Eight Simple Rules: Bridget
by Thor2000
Summary: Inspired by the rumor that Kaley Cuoco was almost Supergirl on Smallville, this story depicts Bridget becoming Supergirl in the real world along with wisdom and a new personality.
1. Chapter 1

All the homes along Oakdale Street were ablaze with lights even into the late evening. The random automobile traveled down the length of the suburban neighborhood for its garage, and the odd family cat crossed the street on its regular nighttime prowling. The O'Doyle's dog was barking at a certain opossum daring enough to come down out of the hills for human trash before scurrying back into the rain gutters for shelter from the neighborhood family pets. The Sutter house on the corner was only partially lit; it was common knowledge in this neighborhood that Pete Sutter was smoking in the house while his wife was away. Several houses over and obscured by trees, the Johnson family clicked off their lights like clockwork at midnight and their automated water sprinklers doused their front yard now long overseen by ceramic trolls since they moved in the year before. The old Shapiro house was still empty and for sale. Rory Hennessy suspected the house was haunted on the fact that it had been unsold for a year now. His father claimed the house was unsold because it was next door to the O'Doyles. Local columnist Paul Hennessy didn't hate the O'Doyles; he just didn't care for them. He just thought they were full of the business. Spying on the old house for traces of supernatural life, Rory looked up to the full moon shining its pallor over the inactive sleepy neighborhood and departed from his telescope for the minute. Crossing down the hall, he stopped at the top flight of stairs and looked down to his parents watching the end of an old Sixties movie on TV.

"Dad?"

"Yes, Rory?"

"I'm getting really worried." The young con artist refrained from breaking a smile to sound concerned. "Bridget's not home yet and it's thirty minutes past her curfew."

"We know, Rory." Paul rolled his eyes at the fact that his son was trying to get his oldest sister in trouble. "You don't need to worry about that."

"Yeah, I mean," Kerry Hennessy, the often quiet and sarcastic middle child, was ready for bed and raiding the family refrigerator for one last drumstick from dinner and a can of juice. "Don't worry about Bridget. You'll be able to hear the yelling when she gets home."

"There won't be any yelling." Cate Hennessy sat next to her husband.

"Yes, there will."

"Paul!"

"Cate, look," Paul switched off the TV and stood collecting an empty popcorn bowl and two former soda drinks to take to the kitchen. "Bridget's curfew is 11:30. For the last few days, you've been forcing me to let her slide as she came in at 11:32, 11:35, 11:41, 11:48, 11:51 and 11:56. The girl's playing us to letting her stay out as late as she wants, and I for one am not about to let her get away with it. Her curfew is 11:30, and the girl is late. Wait a second," He seemingly noticed Kerry and her late night snack before bed. "That better not be the last drumstick."

Paul and Cate's attention was next immediately drawn to the sound of the engine from a 1978 Mustang on its last breath arriving to the curb outside the house and the squeal of shocks in unison with whining brakes. That was the car Bridget had departed in with Steven Danvers, the school jock. Bridget liked him because he looked like actor Tom Welling. Sharing looks of excitement to hear their common sibling getting in trouble, Kerry and Rory started rushing to the side of their parents. It wasn't like watching the self-obsessed blonde teen sexpot was a rare occasion; it happened quite often, but much of the fun was seeing as she tried to wriggle and deal with her punishment. It could range from grounding, chores or confiscation of her cell phone. Bridget made both of them feel like nothing, and Kerry often got the worst of it. Seeing the overly pampered blonde get her due and try to demean the authority of their parents was a scene they could not miss, but sometimes, Paul and Cate had other plans.

"Go to bed!" The two fifty-somethings ordered their two younger kids back upstairs. Rory just spun round and back up the stairs. Kerry turned back for the back staircase behind the kitchen as her snack was taken from her fingers. Her father took the drumstick from his fingers, bit off a piece and returned it to her.

"If I'm going to yell," He explained to his wife. "I'm going to need protein."

"Bridget Erin Hennessy!!!" Cate whipped the front door open to see her blonde daughter leaned back against the outside wall with Steven about to kiss her. His arms were holding her up, her arms were draped round his shoulders. Both their heads turned to the scene of the upset parents that were Bridget's mother and father.

"Son," Paul did not like see his daughter being treated like this. "You better be giving her CPR."

"Could you two give me a minute?" Bridget did not really see Paul and Cate as parents. "I'm kind of in the middle of something."

"You are way past curfew!" Cate spoke loudly, but not nearly as worried or upset as Paul.

"Mr. And Mrs. Hennessy…" Steven stepped back from the daughter with the same decent guy swagger of the WB actor he could have been. "I know we're a bit late, but the battery in my car stalled and I had to get a jump."

"Who got the jump?" Paul thought of his daughter dating as a TV series in his head. "You or the car?"

"Dad!!" Bridget's jaw dropped in embarrassment as her eyes rolled sideways in shame.

"I think I better go…" Steven started backing off as he moved away from Bridget. "My curfew is midnight, but, at least, my parents aren't as strict."

"Strict?" Paul beamed with amusement to the boy. "You wanna see strict?"

"Steven…" The blonde sexpot that was the oldest of the Hennessy kids and the source of unspoken infatuation from most of the guys in the neighborhood pined for what almost was and heart-brokenly reached out to him tramping off the front porch to his car. Fearing what might have been, Bridget spun round upset and embarrassed.

"Do you two realize what you two just did?" She screamed. "You humiliated me!"

"You're welcome." Paul grinned at her act of defiance and noticed a shadow at the top of the stairs. "Rory, Kerry, go to bed!!!"

"Aw, man…" The brother and sister were excused from enjoying their sister coming home late.

"Bridget," Cate Hennessy composed herself and tried her best to mediate. "Your father and I believe you're pushing your curfew too far. We kind if get the feeling you're manipulating us."

"That is like so no true." Bridget was already slipping into her manipulative daughter persona. "I can't help it if a lot of boys want to be with me; I mean, look at me." She lightly posed her hot daughter look. "But when we got out of the movies we just had to go to the mall which I know was out of our way, but then we ran into Jenna and Ashley and they were all no you didn't and I was all like I was because they didn't think I was seeing Steven, but then we sat to talk and Steve was like we got to get going and I was like we had time but then his car wouldn't start and we had to get Jenna's boyfriend Todd – Todd from the swim team, not the football team – to get us a jump, but he didn't have his car so we called Ashley's brother who I already know is into me and I had to pretend not to be into him but yet flirt with him in order to get him to jump Steven's car so we could get going and then we came on here."

She had said it in one breath.

Paul and Cate could barely understand much out of that single sentence. They looked at each other trying to decide whether to believe her, and stepped back a bit and looked at other.

"Do you believe that?" Paul whispered to Cate as Bridget stayed back near the door. "She's grounded."

"Wait, Paul," Cate tried to rationalize the problem. "We have to give her the benefit of the doubt. I mean, she's only thirty minutes late. Let's keep her curfew at 11:30 but with a thirty minute grace."

"But we don't tell her that otherwise she'll always stay out till midnight." Paul whispered back grinning and thinking he was finally ahead of his manipulative daughter for once. He looked at Bridget checking out her nails. She was clad in a red halter and torn blue jeans with assorted undefined accessories and expensive up-style shoes, hardly the image he would have chosen for his daughter. "Beej…"

"11:30 curfew but with a thirty minute grace, got it." Bridget understood and scampered up the stairs to her bedroom.

"She did it to us again, Cate." Paul commiserated back to his wife. "That girl's going to be the death of me." He turned to scream to his daughter already upstairs. "And not another minute more!!!"

"Yes, Paul, I know… I know…" Cate made a face of unrelenting submission to the craziness in this house and hit the upstairs switch to turn off the downstairs lights. All the lights went out except for the kitchen lights.

"The Hennessy family…" An unnoticed nervous guest to the house inhaled a drag from his cigarette and sat in one of the chairs at the kitchen counter. "Quite possibly the stereotype of the quintessential Nineties nuclear family, sans family pet and the lovable but curmudgeonly grandfather figure, well, for maybe this year or so. It is known that what passes for normalcy or the typical is considered to be an illusion; there is no book, no source for what is normal. Each person's life is different than the next, and what is average in your world is not average for others. You see, the Hennessy family will soon have a minor shake-up, but whether it comes by a death in the family or otherwise is not mine to decide. I am only an observer to these events, and your guide to the unusual. What becomes into the family will originate from the heavens, or maybe just perhaps, just perhaps, from that nameless expanse of mystery known to us… as the Twilight Zone."


	2. Chapter 2

2

An upstairs clock at the top of the stairs chimed twice amidst the family portraits of varied sizes on the wall. Two faces in these pictures remained nearly constant, but the other three showed the physical development of three infants into their recent childhood years. Beautiful, blonde Bridget Hennessy was the proud first child born to this family. She had been a precocious child and had grown through youth into the pinnacle of the teenage young girl. Kerry had not embraced her teen years as much; rather than follow the teen cliché, she followed her own rules, appreciating the things important to her over the material and invisible boundaries of the high school norm. She didn't completely hate her materialistic and self-centered sister, but she hated what she represented – the ridiculous myself-ego of the stereotypical teenager. Rory was slowly succumbing to those ideals, but he had also learned and developed ideas from watching his sisters test the patience of his parents. Careful not to repeat their mistakes, he instead chose to see what he could do and what could he get away with it. He had the spirit of the con, but the brain of a young man. Trying to be a young man in the adult world, he saw himself as a revolutionary among teens if only he could get accepted by his peers.

A breeze rattled the oak tree outside the house and scraped its limbs on the side of the Hennessy house. Its shadows broke the beams of light entering the Hennessy house and created the shapes of long spindly fingers clawing up the upstairs hallway. Of the errant shapes of moonlight entering the house, one reached out further than the rest and separated from the shape of the window on the floor. It could have been a spirit, maybe the ghosts of any one of countless souls separated from their bodies. It moved with a sentient wave crossing over the floor and then climbing the wall like the searchlight from an invisible entity. Its energy form could peek through the crack of a doorway into the first room it found. Against the far wall, columnist Paul Hennessy laid in the arms of his wife, Cate. They were both very much in love, and they both had found their directions in life. Paul had the life he wanted and Cate had the family she wanted if not the time to be with them. Groaning and shifting a bit in bed, Cate had turned away from her husband trying to recatch her dreams. A chill in the room had woken her and the silvery light receded to keep from being noticed. Looking to the door, Cate blinked her eyes, yawned and checked her alarm clock before turning to the arms of her husband. In four hours, she had to get up to go to work at the hospital.

The next bedroom in the house belonged to the boy. The energy field had poked through the crack in his door and saw a young man looking at pictures of naked women in a magazine taken from a friend's house by flashlight. Rory knew he shouldn't have had these magazines, but this was his only portal into seeing the physical dimensions of the women he wanted to know. They didn't give him a window into the inner natures of the female mind, but that wasn't nearly as important to him as devolving back to his basest primitive nature. Out the corner of his eyes, he saw the light atop the door and feared the hall light was on as one of his parents made a nightly retreat to the bathroom. Bending his mattress back and tossing the controversial magazine under it, he bounced under his covers and pretended to fall asleep.

Past the top of the back stairs was the girls' room. Shivering through the crack in the doorjamb, the sentient searchlight sensed two more lives in here: one was the intellectual yet sarcastic redhead with a direction in her life and the other was the aimless self-obsessed manipulator whose life began with her looks and ended with what she could get. She had no moral center much less a destination in her life. Such was a hole that could be filled. That was the job of the universe to find and locate beings of potential going nowhere and then to take them somewhere. The redhead had a future; the blonde was still aimlessly pursuing unrealistic goals. Her soul was missing a fragment and that absent portion could be filled. It was not too late. The girl known as Bridget Hennessy could still reach her potential if it was given her. It was the mission of the universe to remove from the world those that were destined to give grief, and it was mankind's destiny to live to its fullest potential.

The silver splinter of sentient moonlight now encroached near Bridget's bed, pausing briefly and then lighting up its underside. Crawling up beneath a layer of blanket and sheets, it followed the warmth of the human body on the bed near it, shining brightly through the bed sheets and shining a pale glow around the bed. The light began dimming a bit as Bridget reacted to rub the sensation in her leg. She thought it was a cramp, but then she felt the stimulating shock of a spark passing through her body, and the overwhelming presence of an invisible force pinning her to her bed.

Her eyes wakened with alarm and she tried to scream. Something was in her bed! Her voice only emitted a barely audible whine from her lungs. Was she being attacked? What was happening to her? She felt as if she were being possessed! Her breath wouldn't come, her heart began pounding faster and harder and she couldn't lift her arms. There was a sound in her head of a million voices whispering a million messages at her at once. Was this a dream? Was she having a heart attack? Her body writhed in pain and then arched up off the bed trying to break free. A tear dropped from her face in fear of what was happening to her. Her sister was sleeping just a few feet from her; why didn't she hear what was happening to her?!

Bridget's hands clawed at her bed for something to hold on to it. Her chest felt as if it was exploding and her head was pounding from the inside out. Her bed creaked under her again as she bounced against it, and her tear-worn eyes stared up to the ceiling from the stress trying to pull it apart. She tried to scream, she tried to catch her breath and she tried to catch her voice. Whatever was violating her was attacking her mind, body and soul. She tried to scream once more, coughing on air blocked from her lungs. Her heart was going to burst. Her body was going to flay itself apart. Whatever was happening to her was trying to kill her!

Shaken from her sleep by the noise in her room, Kerry turned from facing the wall and then toward the source of the sound that had stirred her from sleep. Her eyes attuning to the darkness, she heard Bridget whimper in pain and the sound of her mattress creaking. At first, she had the frightening thought of a boy sneaking into their room and seducing Bridget, but then she realized that her sister was fighting to catch her breath. Slowing sitting up in bed, she looked over to her sister's vague form in the other bed and realized she was fighting off something she couldn't see. She wasn't getting air, her body was jerking and shaking, her lips were gasping and her hands were restlessly grasping for something that wasn't there. As much she sometimes hated her sister, Kerry realized she also sometimes loved her.

"Mom!!!" Kerry brushed her curly red hair over her shoulder and rushed out of the room. Her bare feet sinking into the thick rug of the hallway, she made her parent's room in few seconds and even less footsteps. Her mother was a practicing nurse; she dealt with stuff like this. She grabbed her mother by the shoulders and shook her awake.

"Bridget is having a seizure!!"

"What? Bridget?" Cate shook off sleep and realized what she had heard. Paul emerged from his sleep and dreams of being a single guy living with two sexy girls who weren't his daughters and realized something was wrong. Not to be left out, he raced out for himself behind the steps of his middle daughter if but to see what was happening. He reached his daughter's room and stopped at the sight of his teenage firstborn daughter lying on her stomach on the far side of her bed. One hand draped off the bed, one leg stuck out from the blankets, she looked as if she had been attacked and dumped. With Kerry turning on the lights, Cate grabbed and turned over Bridget's body with the experience of a registered nurse and the care of a worried mother. She checked her daughter's breath from her tilted back head and peeled back her eyelid for pupilary response. Her other daughter stood leaning in the doorframe scared of the possibility of what was happening. Her husband was aghast, unable to speak. From down the hall, Rory wandered barely awake and yawning in his t-shirt and pajama pants.

"What's going on?" He wondered yawning.

"Bridget stopped breathing." Kerry barely spoke.

"Beej," His hand covering his mouth with concern, Paul called his daughter by her pet name. "Beej…"

"Bridget," Cate began seeing her daughter drift from out of her spell. "What did you eat tonight? Did Steven give you something? Are you on something?!"

"Mom, mom…" Bridget gasped a moment taking a breath and placing her hand to her chest. Her eyes rolled sleepily and lazily, her head trying to shake off a spell of dizziness, her left hand reaching to her forehead, she exhaled deeply and looked to her mother with the composed presence of a different person. "I just had a bad dream. Just a nightmare."

"A nightmare?!" Kerry stepped forward. "A nightmare? You scared me to death over a bad dream? What? Did you dream you woke up as a brunette?" At that note, Paul just breathed a token breath of relief and turned guiding his only son back to his room.

"Kerry…" Cate tried to keep the peace.

"I'm sorry." Bridget took another deep breath.

"Kerry, go back to bed." Cate dismissed her other daughter and looked to Paul still in the door. Bridget pulled her blanket up to her chest and pretended to be distracted. "Bridget," Cate again turned to being a nurse. "I want you to come by the hospital after school. I'll have Dr. Masterson check you out."

"I'm not sick."

"Beej," Cate made her worried look. "For me." She stroked a long lock of her daughter's blonde hair out of her face.

"Okay…." Bridget answered as her mother kissed her on the head. She watched her head out and turn off the bedroom light in her path out of the room. Her father gave her a comforting look as well in closing the door. In the dark and light blue light of the moonlight of the room, Bridget looked to Kerry gazing back at her.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, positive." The blonde one responded while adjusting and trying to realign her blankets and sheets. Flipping over her pillow, she laid back down sinking into her bed and looked to her right hand. In the dark room, it looked white, barely pink through the darkness. It sort of tingled now to her. In fact, her whole body was just sort of tingling now… and she liked it.


	3. Chapter 3

3

Most mornings in the Hennessy residence started with the same rituals and the same fights. Rory and Kerry often raced to get to the bathroom before Bridget the diva began "perfecting" her ideal look. The whole process to become stunning to teenage boys took almost an hour started with a fifteen minute shower, most of the hot water in the house, twelve minutes of primping and preening and then most of the morning perfecting the "perfect" outfit, but this morning as Kerry first pounded for her turn to the shower, Bridget actually stopped and emerged five minutes from her shower.

"You're actually done already??"

"You say that like it's never happened before." Bridget was clad in her favorite flannel bathrobe and brushing her hair, but before Kerry could have her turn, Rory pushed past her and took the bathroom.

"Rory!!!" She pounded the door against his evil laughter.

"Kerry," Cate Hennessy tapped her middle child. "Go use mine before your father."

"Thanks, mom…" The insecure red-haired girl took what she could get. Clad in her hospital nursing scrubs, Cate checked her watch. This morning was going smoothly. She wasn't sure what had changed, but there was no fighting from the kids and things were running perfectly and in sync with each other for once. She was actually going to have time to eat breakfast this morning. Clad in his white t-shirt, sweat pants and house shoes, Paul was cooking a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes and oatmeal balanced equally between his wife and three progeny. Pouring herself a glass of orange juice, Cate beamed as Paul leaned to kiss her.

"Morning," He shined to his love. "Have you checked Bridget this morning?"

"Yeah," Cate sipped her juice and took a piece of toast. "Her heart sounded okay, but her pulse seemed fast."

"Of course it was fast," Paul smirked. "You keep your stethoscope in the refrigerator." He mimicked the shortness of breath from the cold instrument to his back.

"No, I don't…" Cate mused on his wit. "I keep it in the freezer."

"Morning," Bridget came ready for her day of school an hour earlier than usual. Cate was speechless; by now, she was screaming at her to get out of the bathroom to let Kerry have a chance. Pouring herself juice, Bridget sat and took her place at the breakfast line-up.

"Beej…" Paul looked up and shined on his favorite daughter. "You're looking good. Nice sweater, decent blue jeans, no flesh tones sticking out, a moderate amount of make-up." He paused and looked upon her bashful face. "Okay, who are you and what did you do to my daughter?!"

"Dad…" The girl brushed it off.

"Now, like I said, Bridget…" Cate reminded her daughter. "After school, I want you by the hospital for a check-up. Not just because of last night, but because you're due for one." She watched her daughter acknowledge her with her hand up. A few minutes more and Rory would be down the stairs slightly ahead of Kerry, but just to keep this from being a completely uneventful morning, they had to have their regular sibling opposition mired in twisted jest.

"Oh my god," Rory appeared to breakfast surprised and perplexed. "Who's this eating with us?" He stood aback. "Is Bridget actually ready for school on time?" His mother tossed the dishtowel at him to get him to shut up.

"Who are you and what did you do to our sister?!" Kerry involved herself in the discovery.

"Ha, ha…." Bridget sat quietly listening.

"Care-bear," Paul Hennessy turned next to try and break through Kerry's shell. "Did you hear anything from the writing contest?" He referred to a contest his newspaper was having between the schools for promising literary students. The Detroit Tribune had called upon Casey Burnette, a journalism teacher from the college and writer William Collins from Maine to look over and judge from some almost two hundred short stories and manuscripts from varied high school kids looking for work in the journalism or writing fields. The lucky teenage writer who won would get money for college and an internship for the paper.

"Yeah, but it probably won't get picked." Kerry ate her breakfast in her pajamas and robe before dressing for school. "William Samms also sent in a manuscript, and he's been writing a column in the school paper."

"Kerry, be positive." Bridget spoke up. "You're much more talented than he is. All he does is write ghost stories and stupid observations."

"Bridget," Rory lifted his head from sniffing the eggs his father had scrambled. "That was actually nice and supportive of Kerry." He paused. "Okay, I gotta ask, who are you and what did you do to our sister?!" Another dishtowel flew past his head.

"Kerry," Cate kissed her daughter's head. "You can be what you want."

"Daddy…." Bridget made her voice youthful and sugary sweet like the little girl she once was.

"What?" Paul reacted to that voice with his usual foreboding and annoying tact that he had when he knew his daughters wanted money.

"Daddy," Bridget looked to her oatmeal as she stirred it around. "As long as I'm getting checked up, would you get a doctor's appointment if I asked you?"

"Bridget," Cate stopped and looked to her blonde daughter amidst her usual morning distractions. Even Paul was put off by that request. "What makes you think your father should see a doctor?"

"Well," Bridget spooned and ate a spoon of oatmeal. "I was reading some of your medical books the other day, and I thought I recognized some symptoms Dad had the other day. It would really make me happy if he made an appointment too and had a cardio-pulmonary arthroscopy of the aorta done."

Breakfast conversation stopped and everyone looked at Bridget. Rory had a mouthful of scrambled eggs and a piece of bacon in his teeth. Kerry had a spoonful of oatmeal barely up to her open mouth and Paul had stopped in mid-pour from filling juice into his morning glass. The Hennessy house was at a stunned silence realizing Bridget was actually concerned with someone else.

"I don't know what scares me more." Kerry finally broke the silence. "That she actually said it right or that she actually read a book."

"Bridget," Cate exchanged looks with Paul and put down some dirty dishes into the sink. "A cardio-pulmonary arthroscopy of the aorta is extremely invasive surgery. It would involve pushing a tiny camera into your father's heart to look for something that wouldn't even be there."

"I don't want to lose dad." Bridget answered distressed. "I can't explain why, but I think he should to have it done. Lots of girls my age lose their fathers over heart problems that could have been detected earlier. I don't want to be one of them."

"Beej," Paul Hennessy felt close to his daughter and drifted even closer to her to assure her with a hug. "I'm a very healthy virile man. You're not going to lose me."

"But you'll have it done, won't you, daddy?"

"What, well, I…" Paul looked to Cate then his kids. He loved them so much. "Sure, Beej, I'll get a check-up too. I'll set an appointment with Ted."

"I've got to be going." Cate paused and looked to her family. "My lord, I'm actually getting in early to work!" She kissed her husband and looked back at her kids with fond thoughts, pausing to look at Bridget as she as a mother noticed something, undetectably different about her. She was her daughter all right, but she had another personality this morning. She wasn't sure what to make of it, but it was going to be at the top of her mind through the day as she guided patients and dealt with doctors. Two of the better St. Thomas Hospital physicians around her were Dr. Elizabeth Masterson, a recent hardworking addition, and Dr. John Dorian, a youthful seasoned physician just out of internship. They both treated Cate as their peers, trusting her and often sharing lives. Liz cared and loved all her patients, and John lived by belief that humor was the best medicine using the Hippocratic oath and the most recent comedy at the theatres to treat the sick and injured. No day was ever regular. Cate was always taking time between convalescents and accident victims. When two members of the Sawyer family were admitted after a vehicular accident with two drunken teenagers, Cate was there when the old man was admitted with broken bones and illusions of a blonde savior.

"She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen." Emmett Sawyer looked up to Cate from beyond the oxygen tubes over his face. "I thought I was going to die, but she got me out of the car before it burst into flames and then flew off in to the sky." His bright blue eyes looked away wistfully as if he was still seeing his angelic savior in his mind.

"Did she?" Cate passed on his hallucination, checked his pulse and updated his chart. "Turn down his morphine drip." She told an attending nurse and turned to head out of the ICU. Pushing through two swinging doors into a corridor leading to a waiting room at one end and patient rooms into the other direction, she turned to the nurse's station and signed her additions to the patient's chart.

"Excuse me?"

"Yes," Cate looked to Mr. Sawyer's brunette middle-aged daughter.

"My father," Louise Sawyer sported a broken arm from her car accident. Her father had been driving when the van with the two boys went through a stoplight and flipped over their car. They didn't survive the crash. "Is he okay?"

"He'll be okay." Cate assured the woman. "You're lucky someone was there to help your dad out of the car. I heard the traffic officer say your car was totaled."

"That's the weirdest thing…" Louise spoke frankly. "She wasn't there at first. I mean… we were going through the light when those boys struck us, and this blonde young lady in a superhero costume and cape dropped down by me, pulled the door off and got me out before helping my dad before flying away. I know it sounds crazy, but she was real." She looked away from Cate. "That's her!!!" Cate's eyes turned and looked down the hall.

"Hi mom." Bridget waved at her mom the length of the hallway next to Dr. Masterson. It was time for her check-up.

"Bridget??!" Cate asked out loud.


	4. Chapter 4

4

"Let's see…" The cute Reese Witherspoon look-alike walked with Cate through the hospital corridor. "Heart, pulse, good… urine test, pristine..."

"Blood test?" Cate asked as Dr. Masterson checked Bridget's report. "I mean… the needle didn't break on her skin or something, did it?" She giggled half in jest.

"What?" Lizzie didn't hear the joke.

"Nothing."

"Uh," The young former intern checked her notes. "Her iron count is excellent, her hearing and acuity is very sharp, she's not pregnant and I would kill for her figure." That did get a bit of a laugh and a chuckle.

"What about her seizure?"

"Maybe it was just a bad dream." Dr. Masterson held her clipboard as a shield against her. "Has anything been bothering her at school?"

"Not that I know of."

"She seems to be a very bright and intelligent young girl, Cate." The lovely female doctor added.

"Okay," Cate stopped and turned back to Dr. Masterson. "Now I know there's something going on with that girl. No one has ever described her as bright or intelligent!!"

"Cate…" Masterson leaned over to calm Cate. "You're after hours now. You can go home now."

"Right." Cate composed herself and had a friendly parting grin with Dr. Masterson before turning to the nurse's station on her floor. Gesturing to one of her friends that she was off her shift, she looked and reached to her purse under the counter and grabbed her jacket from its hook on the wall. Nearly pulling her jacket over her purse strap, she shifted her purse from shoulder to shoulder as she slipped her arms into her sleeves and then took her purse reaching to her cell phone in it and punching out the number to her daughter's cell just as she reached the exit to the parking lot. After a few goodbyes, her heels moved from tapping across hospital linoleum on to the parking lot asphalt. In her ear, she listened to the ringing of her daughter's phone.

"Hello?"

"Bridget, it's mom." Cate reached her car and tossed in her phone while still waving to friends waving back at her. "I just wanted to let you know you got a clean bill of health from Liz."

"What'd you expect?"

"Nothing." Cate lightly chuckled. "Where are you right now? It's so quiet where you are"

"Oh," Bridget seemed to hesitate. "Just hanging out…"

"Want me to pick you up?"

"I got my own ride." Bridget answered. "Love you mom."

"Love you too, Beej." Cate signed off as Bridget shut off her phone and clipped it into a pouch on her yellow belt. She was starting to love this outfit. She had found it at a bargain price in the costume shop and thought it was perfect for the jobs she had to do. It consisted of bright red boots matching her red cheerleader skirt and long red cape. All of them were mere accessories to the main piece, a navy blue leotard with a proud and familiar Kryptonian emblem, a large red letter emblazoned against yellow against her chest. If she was going to act like a certain costumed fictional character, she might as well choose the best one possible instead of trying to be someone else no one would know. A lot of people wanted to be comic book characters, and she had just received the chance to be the best one possible.

Suspended aloft across the stratosphere in synchronous orbit with Detroit below her, Bridget looked across the heavens around her, turning round on her personal axis as a cosmic ballerina with the powers of earth and sky. Endless night was above her and below her was several thousand square miles of layered clouds showing pieces of earth. The lights of Detroit were unmistakable against Lake St. Clair and the rest of the country. It was like seeing particles of sun shining through holes in an endless dark tapestry with endless colors as far as she could see. Every hue of the rainbow was up here in some way and it was endlessly quiet for her to hear from afar the voices of millions of people. Her mind was diffusing through those voices layer at a time… private conversations, angered voices, passionate whispers, annoyed grunts, frustrated screams and then the plaintiff cries for help. Those were the calls for which Bridget now deemed significant. What ever had happened to her had not just made her short of a god, but also passionate to the needs of others. The old self-centered Bridget was no more; the new improved Bridget cared about the world about her, and resolved to help anyone around her who needed it. Upon screams of torment, her eyes focused on the pinprick that voice originated and she dived headfirst back upon the mortal plane. Descending with the velocity of a shooting star, she streaked back to earth through the boundaries of sound barrier with the lights of the city swelling back up to size around her. A light sonic boom echoed behind her as Bridget streaked across the sky.

On earth, Bonnie Marie Misch sat on the cold sidewalk at the corner of Fifth Street and Decatur grieving the loss of her purse. Her weekly paycheck from her job at the diner was in it along with her favorite photos, important numbers and now that young punk was going to waste them on death-inducing drugs or dangerous hallucinogenic plants. Not a single person had tried to stop the young cretin, and now she was pining for help below the dark windows of a closed furniture store with cold strangers passing her by. Tears dropping from her face, she wondered how she was going to tell her son that she could no longer afford to give him a birthday party. Tears dropping from her face, the thirty-eight year old beauty turned to curse at her mugger and saw from down the block the sight of him being jerked off his street and tossed into a dirty alley. The streaking image above the sidewalk was coming closer and closer. It looked like a flying blonde girl with a large red cape who dropped her purse back into her lap before sailing away and vanishing into the night. Realizing once more there was hope in the world, Bonnie stopped crying tears of despair and shed a few tears of joy. She wasn't sure if what she had seen was real or not, but she had her purse and valuables back!!

"Thank you!! Thank you!!"

Near Oakdale Street, Kyle Brady was taking the family trash out to the garbage cans on the curb when he felt a sudden sheer breeze brush over the neighborhood. Leaves swelled up into the air from the massive wind and scrambled across the street and yards. The trees rustled and bent into the direction of the figure sailing by through the area. Knocked to his back by that gust of wind, Kyle landed against the soft grass of his yard and stared to the heavens trying to refresh his mind of the brief image he had seen.

Within the Hennessy house, Kerry had finished her algebra homework and placed it in her pack so that she could have it the next day in school. Now wanting to spend time briefly with her family for as long as she could stand it, she left her bedroom and started for the kitchen, but just before ascending down the back stairs, a vague shape barely cognizant to her eyes rushed up to her and passed her on the top landing. The impact had turned and spun her around twice and she had to grab the wall to keep from falling down the back stairs. Her mind still spinning, she took a deep breath, looked around and continued down the staircase to take a bottle of water from the refrigerator. At the same moment, her mother entered the house through the back door.

"Hi, Care bear…" Cate beamed to her middle child and kissed her head. The sarcastic and introverted girl just mugged a bit and waved the whole thing off. Cate turned her head up and saw her husband and son playing a computer game through the TV. Two boxes of pizza were on the kitchen counter over the stove with one errant plate of uneaten pizza crusts nearby. Miffed at this choice of dinner, Cate took one hearty piece of mushroom, black olive and pepperoni and bit into it as Paul and Rory paused briefly to notice her between killing zombies in their game.

"Nice dinner, Paul." Cate smiled a bit annoyed to her husband. "Is Bridget home?"

"Not yet…" Paul watched as his video character was eliminated by his son's character. "But if she's late again…"

"Hi, mom…" Bridget pranced down the back stairs in her robe and hugged her mother before getting into the pizza.

"Where'd you come from?" Paul jumped to attention.

"The stork brought me?" Bridget responded and reacted confused to the question. She bit into a pizza slice holding her robe shut to her chest with her left hand. "I'm feeling a bit scummy. I'm taking a shower and then straight to bed. Night!" She kissed her mother delicately and shined briefly to her father before hurrying back up the back stairs with another slice of pizza in her hand to sustain her appetite.

"Wait a second…" Rory went from grinning ear to ear after beating his dad in the Zombie Wars computer game to being suspicious. "Bridget's home early and she's going to bed on time? I gotta ask – where's Bridget and who's that stranger in our house?!" His father half seriously poked him in the back.

"Hey! I was just up there." Kerry sipped her water with one hand and pointed upstairs with her left. "She was not up there."

"What's wrong with you two?" Paul was disconnecting the video player to see the evening news. "I saw her come in the front door a few minutes ago…" He paused a bit unsure. "I'm sure I did." He paused thinking it over. "Yeah, I did… The thing is… she's home and on time for a change, and why? Because your mom and I laid down the lawn." He got a grinning nod of confidence from Cate. "I mean… where else would Bridget have been."

"We have just had our twenty-third Supergirl sighting here in the Greater Detroit area." Local news anchor Peter MacNichol announced just as the television was reverted back to regular TV viewing. "As you may know, starting with this morning, witnesses have been reporting an attractive young girl in a Supergirl costume presumably and allegedly flying through the city helping people. At first, rumors were that a movie might have been filming in town, but as late, the local police deny that is happening. As you can see from this amateur footage taped from a young man's handheld camera, it seems that Detroit might just have a true honest-to-goodness superhero!"

Paul, Cate, Kerry and Rory leaned into the television in unison and dropped their jaws simultaneously. The grainy footage taken from a city block away of the subject showed a vague blond teenage girl in costume landing in the middle of a street filled with fire engines and placing an elderly woman in the hands of paramedics. The camera had been taping an apartment house on fire in nearby Sterling Heights, and with it, it had taped the superhuman beauty rescuing the trapped woman from a third floor apartment by carrying her to the ground and then ascending to the ground. Her shape, her size, her build, her demeanor and vague likeness were all like someone they already knew. Someone they heard in the upstairs shower!


	5. Chapter 5

5

Karen Boyd and William Simpson owned and operated the Galaxy Comics and Collectibles Shop on Twelfth Street in Detroit and in just a few days, young girls were buying up and ordering anything that pertained to the fictional Supergirl character from DC Comics. They had seen the news, they were renting the less-than-grand Helen Slater movie from 1980 and were now all dressing up like their favorite role model. Bridget would beam ear-to-ear to see those little princesses running up and down the block trying to fly, but then she would notice Kerry looking at her with fearful suspicion. Pretending to get distracted, Bridget would then leave her for something else.

While DC Comics was having a field day over the price sales to comic memorabilia from the inexplicable sightings to their character, they were also trying to learn just what special effects engineers were stealing their character. Special effect engineers and computer programmers who specialized in computerized CGI effects were being called upon to analyze amateur footage from Detroit showing this girl flying and lifting cars and were giving their opinions, but no one answer could answer the public trying to learn what was happening. Newspapers were selling out from this character, the Detroit police were going on a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Officially, this person did not exist. They agreed that an unknown young girl or a number of similar young girls were helping out across town, but they would not explain or go on the record on the strange occurrences occurring with increasing intensity. After an anonymous tip about an illegal chop shop off Jefferson Highway, they arrived on the scene to find eighteen stolen cars in various stages of assembly and eleven car thieves strung up by their underpants. When seven-year-old Amelia Fichtner vanished from a playground near her home, an immediate Amber Alert went out in search of her. Less than an hour later, little Amelia was found safe and secure on her parent's porch waving to the blue and red angel that had saved her. After America's Most Wanted announced that child rapist and suspected murderer DeJesus Antonio Ramirez was probably loose in Detroit after fleeing Chicago, he was found hanging from his underwear from a street light outside Detroit's Twelfth Precinct. After elderly Gladys Shoulders was taken forcibly by her deranged son on a run from the police, she was safely found by her daughter and son-in-law by the side of Interstate 75 near the crashed ruins of her SUV as the middle-aged felon hung from a tree by his underwear cursing at "a flying blonde bimbo."

At Oakdale High School, Kyle had started a Supergirl Fan Club not directed to the comic book character but to collecting the newspaper articles about the new local figment and discussing theories on her powers and origins. They even collected cases not directly connected to her but rumored as linked to her. It was first a mere twenty cases, but as possible accounts swelled, there were now almost fifty cases of this blonde superhero. The club had started with four guys and had now reached up to eighteen, getting permission from Principal Ed Gibb to be a school-sanctioned group. Through all of it, Kerry Hennessey was about to lose it. Even her best friends were wearing Supergirl t-shirts and Supergirl posters were going up all over the school. Boys were going crazy describing the latest sightings and girls wanted their hair done just like her. It was a bigger madhouse than before.

"I can't believe all this." Bridget grinned by her side as her ego swelled a bit.

"You can't believe all this?!!" Kerry paused by her school locker, ripped off the Supergirl emblem taped to the exterior of it and shoved it at Bridget before slowly calming. "Bridget, for the last time… are you SURE there's anything you want to tell me?"

"Well…" Bridget paused and thought about it, her blue eyes turned back looking for thoughts in her head before looking back to her sister. "I heard you're going to win the writing contest."

Kerry just screamed under her breath and turned to her locker. Bridget had been dressing less provocatively since her seizure. Gone were the short shirts and hip-hugging jeans and high heels. Dressed in a dark green sweater with violet slacks and dark pumps, she just tried to respect her little sister and looked away to respect her privacy. As she did, Steven Danvers started coming to her. He was wearing his football jersey over a long sleeved black shirt and beamed his steely grin toward her. Reaching out to lean against the lockers, he grimaced a bit abashedly and flipped back his hair as he cleared his throat.

"Bridget," He really was a decent guy compared to several of his buddies, and he really did like her. "I've been trying to get in touch with you for a week. My dad and I got the Mustang going great. Would you like to go out again tonight?"

"I'd love to!" The old Bridget resurfaced and swooned, but then the newer intellectual and secretive Bridget took over again. "But I've got some commitments I can't get out of."

"Oh my god…." Eavesdropping, Kerry missed the self-centered sister she used to have.

"How about Saturday?" Bridget offered.

"It's a date!" Steven cheered emotionally and took her hand. The blonde one beamed and shined like a star to see him. Their hands connected and parted as he turned and headed to gym class. Kerry meanwhile closed her locker and dropped her head against groaning. The sound of her head and her groan got her sister's attention. Pulling her red locks of hair exasperatedly back, Kerry turned her head back to her sister looking at her confusingly.

"Who are you?!!!" Kerry demanded to know.

"I'm your sister."

"Make me believe it." Kerry stared at her waiting for her to reveal her secret, but Bridget just rolled her eyes confusingly. The school bell now rang and both sisters had to go to separate classes. Kerry had to get to Mrs. Cuoco's French class where she sat close to Kyle Brady himself. He had once been Bridget's boyfriend, but now she was his main love interest. It was a better relationship that the self-center relationship he had been trapped in with Bridget. When Kyle looked at Kerry, she lit up as never before as if she were a rose turning up to the sun. Taking her desk, they shared a brief meaningful glance amongst the others piling in late and slowly and hesitantly turned to being high school students. Their teacher noted the clock as the warning bell to class rang out loud and one later student struggled his way into the classroom.

"Good morning, students…" Principal Ed Gibb started the morning assignments over the school address system. "It's another day here and I would like to remind you this is a school and a place of learning. It is not a prison or a sanitarium, but it does have rules to make your lives easier until you all become menaces to society."

Kerry buried herself into her book as the under-achievers and school rejects lined against the back wall applauded in unison their low intelligence and disregard for normal society. They had become disposable human beings and didn't care.

"First off," Gibb went on with announcements. "I would like to mention the school is having a pancake breakfast this Saturday to raise money for the cheerleaders to get new uniforms, but we will not be having sausage or bacon this year due to the Montgomery Haskell incident." He referred to last year's case of food poisoning when one student mixed in rancid meat from home into the previous school dinner and sent over forty people to the hospital.

"The school book store may finally open again." Gibb sounded jovial. "We finally found the other key!"

"Coach Kutcher is asking for information in the theft of twelve stolen basketballs." Gibb paused. "Come on, who stole the basketballs? The school basketball team has nothing to play with!"

"The drama team is proud to announce they have chosen their next play." Gibb was reading from one not to another. "They will all be starring in a stage production of _The Suite Life of Zack and Cody_." Gibb stopped and stared in disbelief at his receptionist. "Oh come on!!! I guess I can predict who will get the starring roles."

Matthew and Marcus Summers, the school's only blonde set of twin boys, were in Kerry's class. They both grinned and slapped their hands together in the same way as Cole and Dylan Sprouse, the show's stars.

"Today is Ashley Kreuk's birthday." Gibb read another note. "Tomorrow is her son's."

Kerry looked over to her classmate and wished her happy birthday. The seventeen-year-old had been a teenage mother for about a year now.

"From now on," Gibb got one more note. "The school computer lab will not allow photo-shopping done without a teacher present. It seems one simulated nude photo of Mrs. Bobbitt, our revered art teacher, was not enough, but two thousand was one too many. If anyone knows the guilty party, please pass along their name. Your tip can be held anonymous." Gibb rolled his eyes on this travesty against the school's youngest and unfortunately most loved teachers among the male students. "Friday is her last day as she is now leaving us for an easier job; she is joining the police academy!"

"Today's menu in the cafeteria is hamburgers on line one, fried chicken in line two and the salad bar will be open today. I am proud to announce we have now started buying only fresh vegetables and they will be cleaned." Gibb paused. "The snack machines will now be turned off during lunch hours, and turned on afterward. This does not affect the soda machines" There was a collective groan in the classrooms.

Principal Ed Gibb continued. "And as you all know, we had a very good response to the literary contest and had several very promising writers, but after mulling over several potential short stories, and several nauseating would-be porn manuscripts, they finally came up with a winner."

"Congratulations, Kerry…" William Samms leaned over and whispered to Kerry.

"Thanks…" She beamed trying to deny her secret crush on him.

"The winner of the 2005 Detroit Tribune High School Literary Contest is…." Ed continued then paused fumbling with the intercom mike. "Is this right? Are you sure?" There was whispering over the school intercoms. "How is this possible?" He came back on. "The winner is… are you ready for this people? Bridget Hennessy????"

There was a pause of shocked silence through the school as student, faculty and even maintenance waited for the joke.

"What!!!!!" Kerry finally screamed.

In Mrs. Davidson's American History class, the room exploded and the boys cheered for the blonde one. Bridget lifted her head from her copy of the Iliad as her face went into shock.


	6. Chapter 6

6

Bridget's last minute submission to the contest had intrigued and fascinated novelist William Collins; he wished he had thought of it first. Casey Burnette thought the Gothic little tale was reminiscent of Hitchcock and Stephen King as it told the tale of terror between two sisters - one raised in a foundling home and the attractive and beautiful blonde one who lived with a horrible secret in the family home. It read as a dark and atmospheric ghost story and then changed plots into another sort of tale about the war between beauty and power against innocence and wisdom. The thinly veiled character compared to Kerry in the story won in the end, but the blonde one in the piece of fiction was obviously Bridget describing herself as a powerful force in the universe. Upon meeting the young writer, Collins had expected a gifted brunette loner, not the vivacious and extroverted blonde bombshell he was allowed to meet. Angry, livid and cheated, Kerry cut off any last relationship she had with this person she was related to and tried to forget she had an older sister.

"Hey, Care bear!!" Paul heard his middle daughter storming into the house. Pushing and rolling his chair out from the family computer, he turned his smiling face to his favorite daughter. He then saw her face and read the heartbreak in it. "You didn't win the contest?"

"No, but guess who did!!!" She roared from the bottom of her broken heart.

"Kerry," Bridget entered into the house a few steps behind. "I am so sorry!! I said you could have the internship and intuition!!!"

"Bridget!!!" Paul reacted with surprise. From the kitchen, Rory lifted his head in surprised shock!

"Dad," He sidled up to his dad. "I'm scared."

"I don't want it anymore!!!" Kerry yelled at Bridget. "I mean…" Her voice calmed a bit. "Who are you? You can't be my sister. You're… someone else."

"Kerry…" Bridget looked at her. "I don't understand what you're talking about."

"Bridget," Paul had eased over his initial surprise and astonishment. "You? You won??"

"I sent in this little story I created a long time ago." Bridget reacted quietly amiss and demure for the moment. "I never would have guessed it would have won." Her father hugged her proudly in this moment.

"I never would have guessed you could write a book." Rory stood near Kerry and mumbled under breath. "I never would have guessed you could even read a book."

"Dad, come on…" Kerry's voice slowly rose again. "We all know something has been wrong with Bridget for the last three weeks! She's been coming home early. She hasn't even been doing any shopping! She hasn't been sneaking out… or has she just gotten better at it. " Her eyes narrowed suspiciously at her older sister.

"Yeah…" Rory knew where this was going.

"I have no idea where she's going with this." Bridget paused by the staircase and looked sideways to her father.

"Kerry…" Paul tried to intercede.

"Her idiot friends have been coming up to me and asking where Bridget has been." Kerry continued becoming confrontational. "She hasn't been going out with them for a while. Where have been, Bridget? Do I have to ask? We all know where she's been, don't we?"

"She's an advance scout for an alien invasion!!!" Rory screamed out loud. "They took Bridget, but they don't know how to act like Bridget!!!" He noticed Kerry looking at him with disgusted confusion. Bridget lowered her head and crossed her arms across the front of her sweater; her lower lip dropping speechless and her left eyebrow rising in uncertainty. Paul turned and looked to his son as if he had caught him wearing a dress.

"Don't help me." Kerry spoke down to her brother, then turned back to her father and gazed back to Bridget. "Where's your flying costume, Bridget? The one with the big red "S" stretched across your boobs." She confronted her sister and stepped toward her.

"Is that what this is about?" Bridget made a face. "That girl's not me!!" She looked to her father for support. "Daddy?"

"Well, Beej…"

"You think it's me too??" Bridget couldn't believe this was happening. "She doesn't look a thing like me!!!"

"Well, of course she doesn't!" Paul tried being a dad again to secure the peace.

"Dad!!!" Kerry screamed in disgust at his lack of support.

"Well, maybe a little bit…" Paul refused to have a part in this. He'd had this similar debate with Cate in the subdued silence of their bedroom the night of the Sterling Heights fire and the TV footage of the Supergirl on the news. They had decided in the end that it could not be Bridget, but still, that nagging little feeling that it could be still festered. He kind of wondered if his eldest daughter could be the superhuman presence invading the news, but he also hoped she wasn't.

"Look…" Paul took a deep breath and took his usual place between his feuding daughters. "Kerry, I know you're hurt about not winning the contest…"

"I don't care about that contest!" Kerry screeched. "What about it, Bridget? You going to fly away crying now?!"

"I wish I was that girl so I could pound you into the next neighborhood!" Bridget stepped up against her sister. Rory stepped back grinning and munching on popcorn.

"Bridget!!!"

"Let her do it, dad! Let her do it."

"Rory!!!" Paul stopped and composed himself. "Why is your mother never here for these things?"

"Forget it!" Bridget turned and grabbed her purse. "I'm going shopping!!!" She pulled on the front door and marched out in disgust. Slamming the door behind her, she tramped down the front walk of her house and back to the family mini-van. Her father rushed out to stop her, but instead paused and held his hand to his chest wanting to get her to confide in him. He thought he was a good father, but there were times like this that he had nothing to call up for experience. How do you ask a child if she's been imbued with otherworldly gifts?

"Thank god, she's driving instead of flying." He mumbled under breath and stepped back into the house. Kerry and Rory were huddled for a minute comparing secret notes but broke up on his approach.

"Kerry…"

"Dad, you know as well as I do that Bridget has not been Bridget since…" She paused a moment. "Whenever."

"Don't you think your mother and I have debated this?" Paul glanced briefly to his computer work but turned instead to the kitchen to get a drink. "We don't have enough evidence."

"Not enough evidence?" Kerry reacted to his indifference. "But the girl on the news…"

"Only resembled Bridget…" Paul poured himself some tea from a pitcher. "For years people thought I looked like that guy in the TV show living with two girls." He sipped his drink.

"I love that show." Rory confessed out of turn as he and his father bonded with a manly knock of fists to each other.

"But you can't force Bridget to confess to something without proof." Paul paused with cup in hand. "Your mother and I have had a lot of experience in that."

"Dad," Kerry looked to him for faith. "She wrote a short story."

"Small steps, Care bear." Paul looked to Kerry. They stared to each other and realized on a non-verbal level that they already knew the truth. Yes, it was entirely possible that Bridget was that girl, but they would not get her to admit it by confronting her about it.

"Why couldn't I have been bitten by a radioactive spider?" Rory grieved his chance to be something special.


	7. Chapter 7

When Detroit police officers reached the old Steiner Lift Factory, their flashlights at first beheld empty space and deserted equipment in the empty textile plant. The empty and deserted factory on the riverfront had closed down just under fourteen years ago, left to rot and decay under the weather and fall apart around vandals and the homeless. Not even a ghost appeared when police investigated the tip that a meth lab was being operated in the basement, but soon they found recent repairs and long electrical cables running down the staircase into a room lit up ablaze with lights, a littered room of glasses, powders, chemicals and heat sources. It was enough to have blown up entire city block and poison over five hundred people. Its seven creators had been thrown through the place and in need of hospital care. Broken bones, concussions, internal injuries and crushed hands were the mildest of their injuries. One drugged out meth maker was hanging by the elastic in his underwear twelve feet off the floor. Another was using his own foul poison to kill the pain of his shattered legs and two others were hanging upside down from metal gnarled and crushed into shackles around their feet. Another one was pinned under debris inside the old elevator cursing at a "blonde bimbo in a red cape." When police turned to trace their anonymous tip to the illegal lab, they traced it to a pay phone and several witnesses who had seen a blonde girl in a Supergirl costume using it.

Several blocks away, almost thirty people with camera phones taped a blonde angel in blue and red ascending up over a church steeple and rocketing into the night sky. A six year-old girl saw her and bolted away from her mother trying to get her attention. Before a multitude of witnesses, the small and slight brunette pixie raced down the sidewalk screaming at the flying shadow quickly disappearing into the clouds and ran into the street trying to get the blonde presence to see her. Mother just stopped in shock at the sight of the bus screeching to a halt to the sudden child in its path and numerous people cringed realizing they were about to see the death of innocence. The bus driver stomped his brakes desperate to stop his twenty-ton behemoth from erasing the child before him from existence. There were only five people on board and they jerked forward over seats and each other. The big blue eyes of the child turned up to the headlights barreling upon her. A woman screamed, witnesses hollered warnings at the errant child and tires screeched against the cold asphalt road as the massive steel transit vehicle screeched from forty-five miles an hour to a deep stop, roaring over the child vanishing under its grill and into the center of the intersection. A white hatchback swerved and drove over the curb. A white SUV stopped short and a rush of persons stormed the street looking for a tiny body under the bus.

"My baby!!! My baby!!!" Tricia Haltom hysterically pushed through the crowd of on-lookers and discharging transit passengers looking for her child. One gentleman had dropped to reach under the hot front end of the stopped bus, but all he reached into was darkness. Distraught and grief-stricken, Tricia was comforted by a middle-aged mother holding her back. Another pedestrian scouted the stopped and traffic-strewn street for a thrown body then arched his head upward.

"Again! Again!" A young girl's voice cheered.

"Only if you promise to stay out of the street." Bridget Hennessy descended down to earth right before the flustered mother. Her eyes filled with tears, Tricia hesitated in stunned shock and quickly grabbed up her daughter from this person in the costume. A hundred camera phones were clicking on the maiden of might as a police car ascended on the blocked intersection.

"You're real?" Tricia's distraught tears turned to tears of joy before her daughter's savior.

"Apparently." Bridget gasped a response and lifted her head up as she began levitating back up to the air. There were a hundred voices calling to her and over a dozen hands reaching to try and pull her back to keep her on earth for questions. Her costume slipped through their fingers and her legs and feet were beyond grasp as a lone traffic officer refused to admit what he was seeing.

"Hey, did anyone get her picture?" Someone yelled.

"By camera phone went dead!"

"My battery just died!"

"All I got was a vague blob!"

It was now obvious that no one had got a picture this time. Rising back into the sky, Bridget leveled out at two hundred feet and stared out over the geometric layout of lights, roads and dark buildings around her. Her long blonde locks were waving around her as she flew up just beyond the radar range of the local airport then swerved toward home. Her eyes carefully panned the city around her; the breeze trying to dry out her eyes with no result. She didn't try to analyze her powers or just how they worked; she just knew unconsciously how they worked and if she did not want her picture taken again, it happened. Whether her power was magic or science in nature, she didn't care. She had finally found her calling and liked what she had become. Her bearing was royal, her grace almost godly and her aerobic aerial maneuvers fit for angelic beings. She swooped down through an alley with a mental agenda and shot up the back wall of the local Brendan Morris Memorial Library. It was a three story tall Victorian building of red stone and brick with its top floor reserved for the local historic society. The second floor had a community meeting room and the non-fiction shelves. Passing her hand over a roof level skylight, Bridget conjured open a secret entrance from the roof down into the closed and darkened building and lowered down to the main floor level as if she were invading a underworld sanctum. The only lights were from lights streaming from windows and the red exit signs illuminating the darkness. Her heels scraping across the carpeted floors, Bridget retraced her steps back to the shelves in the back of the library where the research books were along with her street clothes behind a top shelf.

Pulling her sweater over her head and costume, she sat down on a nearby chair to pull her socks and shoes on up over her fax boots, even taking the time to tuck the red tips of her boots into her socks to keep them from being seen. Standing in her shoes, she looked up to the skylight ready to depart, then hesitated, pulled a lock of her blonde hair from her face and had an epiphany. As soon as she got home, someone was going to start making connections and accusations and she did not want that. She had a wonderful little secret here, and she wanted it to stay that way, but if she was going to dissuade those ideas, she had to create a little doubt. She had to confuse them, muddle the waters under their train of thought. Pretending to be the old Bridget was the best venture in this. Barely hovering an inch off the floor to once again ascend through the roof, she dropped to the floor and instead strided with purpose through the darkened library for the checkout area. Her eyes scanned the cleared library counter and she reached to the phone and turned it toward her.

Back on Oakdale Avenue, Paul and Cate Hennessy paced back and forth before the fireplace contemplating what was happening. Kerry was curled up reading a book on the sofa in trying to ignore the world around her and Rory was watching Court TV on the television. Bridget was late again, but whether or not she was flying the skies or hanging out with people they didn't know was the big debate. What should they think? Was it Bridget in the news, or was it just someone who looked like her? Could it be Bridget? She had changed remarkably in the last few weeks, but how far had she changed? What was going on around here?

"Mom," Rory looked up during a commercial break to raid the kitchen for food. "Want me to call the Air Force and see if they can get Bridget on Radar?"

"Enough with you!" Paul snapped at his attitude, and Cate stared at him upset with his sarcasm. "Go up to bed!!"

"Don't know why you're worried." Kerry didn't look up from her novel. "From what I understand, Bridget's bulletproof now…."

"You too!" Cate pulled her middle child by the arm for the stairs. At that moment, the phone by the sofa rang and Paul jumped on it with the desperate fear of a worried father.

"Hello? Hello?!" He put the receiver to his ear.

"Daddy…" Bridget made her best little girl voice.

"Bridget…" Paul looked at Cate. "The Old Bridget's back." He hoped and reported as Kerry sat once more on the sofa rolling her eyes. "Where are you? You better not be at the police station."

"I'm locked in the library and can't get out." She pouted while adjusting her skirt and zipping it up. "It's creepy in here. Can you come get me?" Her voice was childlike and innocent.

"You're locked in the library?" Paul screamed out of surprise.

"She's what?!" Cate reacted as well.

"You mean she actually knows where it is?" Rory answered in a faux perplexed and sarcastic state. After another harsh stare to his son, Paul asked the obvious question.

"How in the world do you get locked in the library?!" He reverted to being the angry father.

"I fell asleep in the restroom." Bridget claimed trying to be the perfect dupe. In her mind, pretending to be stupid was now turning out to be her best defense against her dual identity.

"How in the world did she get locked in the library?!" Cate asked only hearing one side of the phone call.

"She fell asleep in the restroom." Paul relayed the message, but Cate grew upset at only being half-involved and took the phone from him.

"Bridget…" Cate paced still clad in her hospital scrubs. "Why didn't you just call 911?"

"I couldn't recall the number…" Bridget rolled her eyes realizing how easy this was becoming. "Besides, I didn't want to get in trouble."

"How could someone who wrote a winning short story do something this stupid?" Kerry stood up at the sofa and asked herself, and then it dawned on her. Maybe, this was just part of an act. Bridget knew she had been confronted, and this was a nice stunt to try and cover her identity. In minutes, her father would meet with the police and one of the librarians outside the library to unlock the building and let the supposedly over-looked blonde high school student out again. While it was confessed that the librarians don't check the bathrooms thoroughly, it was Bridget's excuse that she had been so upset with what Kerry accused her of that she had gone to the library to hide and cry her eyes out, but she had fallen asleep from her tiring emotion-wrought ordeal.

It would be a silent aftermath. By time, her father returned with her wayward and supposedly absent-minded sister, Kerry had been laying in bed pretending to be asleep as Bridget returned home and readied for bed. She heard Bridget puttering through the bathroom and bedroom behind her and waited defiantly for the blonde one to go asleep and then waited a bit longer. It was almost two o'clock when Kerry rolled over in bed after waiting awake for two three hours for her sister to go to sleep. Gazing over at the lump in the other bed in her room, she gripped tightly the scissors in her hand and carefully and lightly treaded across the room to test the comic book adage of the hair that could not be cut. Along the way, someone else had the same idea and Kerry encountered her brother Rory sneaking into her bedroom as well in his white undershirt and pajama pants also equipped with scissors.

"What are you doing here?!" She voiced so inaudibly that she was almost voicing her own words.

"Same as you!" He whispered back upon seeing her with scissors. "Testing to see if our sister is a mutant!" They looked in unison upon Bridget to see if she was asleep. She hadn't stirred.

"Let me do it." Kerry voiced under her breath. "You'd just wake her up and then she'd know that we know."

"But we do know."

"Step back…" Kerry swapped her sewing scissors for the better pair that Rory had brought. Carefully treading the room in her bare feet, she first tried to reach over the bed and then decided or hovering over the other end of the bed for the long tufts of blonde hair sticking above the covers. Bridget was buried in the bed hugging her pillow and her long blonde locks were bunched behind her head from the blankets pulled up tight. Reaching for a good place to cut, Kerry made one last look to Rory scared for a second of what they were about to discover then lifted a long strand of errant hair ready to cut it from her sister's head.

"Cut it from underneath…." Bridget's voice emanated from her lips. "It's less noticeable."

Kerry and Rory froze extending looks of surprise that their sister had been awake the whole time. An arm reached from under the blankets and flipped on the light on her nightstand, and Bridget turned her body up and sat up in bed. She lightly exhaled, slowly blinked tiredly and looked to her sister then her brother.

"It was her idea!" Rory spoke out loud at normal voice level. Kerry shot him a look of disgust with her mouth hanging open and refrained from swatting him.

"You're awake??!" She turned to Bridget.

"You hurt me a lot tonight, Kerry." Bridget gasped tiredly with her hand to her heart. "Why are you doing this to me?" Shaking her head defeatedly, she noticed the scissors in her sister's hand and took them noticeably upset and reached blindly under her hair for the back of her neck where she could hide a chunk of missing hair. There was a snip of the scissors and she pulled out a small snip of blonde hair only about three inches long. She dropped the scissors by her nightstand and divided her lock of severed hair between her brother and sister.

"Here," She produced her locks to Rory. "You can sell that to your little friends."

"Thanks, Bridget!" Rory's face lit up and departed for his room. Tired and still spiritually shattered, Bridget turned her head to Kerry and reacted spiritually defeated. Kerry looked down to the hair in her hand in empty victory then looked up to her sister's crushed and spiritless blue eyes. The older sister was expecting an apology.

"Bridget, please…" Kerry implored her again. "You can tell me anything. Why won't you let me in?"

Bridget just sighed disgustedly, switched her light back off and sunk into bed. Unsure what to think, Kerry sighed a bit herself and turned to her bed in the dark. Her mattress chinked a bit with her body settling on to it and she poked her legs back under her covers wondering what to try next. A clump of snipped hair was not much proof, but as she reached out to drop the blonde strands to the floor, she realized something else. There were still follicles attached to these strands. They'd been pulled out, not cut!


	8. Chapter 8

Kerry's mind was flashing back on her old Nancy Drew books; mostly because she was trying to solve the mystery of Bridget Hennessey, her own sister! How could self-absorbed, materialistic and manipulative Bridget suddenly become intellectual, caring and quite possibly… superhuman? She had screen captures of the local Supergirl sightings from the TV News, plus she had the few photos that had been taken of the figure sailing through Detroit up until it became obvious no one else was ever going to take another photo of her. If there was any other chance to catch Bridget in that costume, she had to be there when Bridget popped out of the sky in public. With her hearing now, and her propensity for acting confused when the subject came up, Kerry realized now that Bridget was not going to take her into her confidence. On the other hand, where was she hiding that costume? Was she wearing it all the time? When was she washing it?

"Kyle…" Kerry confronted Bridget's ex-boyfriend. "You created the school's chapter of Supergirl Watchers…"

"Correction…" Kyle stopped her. "The Supergirl Fan Club…"

"Whatever…" Kerry rolled her eyes in annoyance. "Look, I need as many copies of the pictures you geeks have."

"She is beautiful, isn't she?"

"You ought to know… you once dated her." Kerry mumbled under her breath.

"What was that?"

"Nothing…." Kerry staved off his attention to her mumbling. Even she could not resort to being so vicious as to expose her sister's dual natural. "I need pictures, as many as you have. Preferably clear and in color…. Oh, and up close…."

"Sure…" Kyle beamed over Bridget's sister, thinking she was kind of cute in her own way. "You know who she reminds me of…"

"Who?"

"Reese Witherspoon." Kyle grinned vacuously. "Think about it…. Have we ever really seen them together?"

"God, you're an idiot…." Kerry turned down the other way through the school heading for the library to research on the Internet computers. Along the way, she passed the short hall at the front entrance outside the school offices and she recognized a person she knew very well. Garbed in a dark brown suede jacket with a dark shirt and blue jeans, William Collins was the Maine writer who had helped in the local contest. She respected him as a writer, but not so much his pursuit as an infamous paranormal researcher. He was also a friend of her father and a former guest of her home. In fact, it was Paul who recommended William to help judge the essay contest. Shaking the hand of Ed Gibb briefly, the horror writer turned away to head back to his hotel.

"Mr. Collins," Kerry stopped the prolific writer and paranormal researcher. "What was wrong with my story? What? Was it just not good enough? I mean, how on earth could Bridget win?!"

"Kerry," Collins checked the time on his watch as he stared at the young redhead then removed his sunglasses. "It was a very good story, but a bit cerebral and advanced even for me. You had **me** looking up words in the dictionary. It could be published right now, but you really should be trying to develop your craft first before trying to make a literary statement. Try not to show off your intelligence and try more to create a story that people will want to read. In other words, you created a college level manuscript in a contest meant for high school kids."

"I was that advanced?" Kerry realized what he was saying.

"I get the feeling you're going to excel in anything you start." Collins delicately replaced his sunglasses. "Say hey to your dad for me."

"Yeah, sure…" Kerry started to turn away then stopped and grabbed his arm to deter his departure. "One other thing…" She lightly brushed her long hair out of her eyes. "What do you think of our local phenomenon? Our Supergirl sightings?"

"Give a week…" Collins lightly thought it over as his eyes looked her over through his glasses. "I'm pretty sure they're all promotions for a movie coming in a few weeks." As a paranormal explorer, he grasped on to the most logical suggestion.

"Wish I could be that sure…." Kerry realized that both the Detroit police and DC Comics had already dismissed that possibility. Taking a deep breath, she sighed turning back for her way to the library. Where other kids were rushing home and others worked on school activities, she was going to be doing research in the school library looking up strange events for the last few days. Maybe a sighting of a comet or the testimony of another regular person who suddenly felt imbued with gifts. After all, Bridget was no one special; why should she be the only one in a city of millions suddenly imbued with godlike gifts. Something had happened to Bridget; she knew it and her parents knew it. Neither of her parents was particularly distressed about it, or if they were, they were effectively hiding it. They suddenly had a dream daughter who was no longer spending a lot of money or trying to deceive them. Why should they be worried? It wasn't like Bridget would suddenly go ballistic and destroy them, or would she?

That was racing through her mind as Cate Hennessy sat stuck in traffic wanting to get home. She had had only a partial shift at the hospital, but now she felt stupid for leaving too fast and colliding with the unrelenting 3:00 after school and off work traffic. It had started out steady, but then she thought cutting through DeKalb street would be a good short-cut to Oakdale, but the detour for the new asphalt laying sent her into the wrong direction over to Demonbreun, one of the worst traffic spots in town. Accidents occurred here nearly on a weekly basis. Stoplights were mere blocks apart, and cars snarled here for hours on end. It was a major artery in town across a major highway. Four lanes of cars lined with sidewalks and crossing lanes where drivers had scant minutes to move or else get caught by the light again. The light had caught her as she expected, but when it turned green again and she started ahead, the line of cars ahead of her had not started moving. They were stopped ahead of her by police letting more cars turn off a block ahead. Another car pulled up alongside her left and Cate found herself stuck not just at the same red light but in the lane of traffic again. She couldn't turn left out of the way nor could she back up out of the way. She was in gridlock, practically parked on the intersection without anywhere to go and up ahead, the light turned red once more.

"Oh, come on!!!" Her temper flared and her fist pounded the dashboard, and then she heard it: the horn of the garbage truck coming toward her on the intersection. It was coming up on her just a might too fast. Didn't the driver see that the traffic was backed up in front of it? Cate looked to see if she had room to back up or to turn out of the way. She was boxed in with all the other commuters. The truck's brakes locked on and it started screeching to a stop a bit too late. Tires screeching against the asphalt road, it still had about fifty tons of momentum to take it into Cate's car. The nurse and the mother of three widened her eyes and dropped her jaw and turned to jump from her car to avoid a possible collision. Truck driver Lionel Bruce dropped his sandwich from his mouth, grabbed his wheel with both his hands and stood on his brakes trying to stop his truck as hard as he could. Cate Hennessey was too scared to think rationally; she was scared for her life and fighting with her seat belt. No cars were moving except for the truck screeching straight into her path. Lionel Bruce clenched his teeth and stood on his brakes. Time seemed to slow down for Cate as she started scrambling and fighting her way out of her car.

Bruce heard a sudden thump and opened his eyes. Someone had hit his fifty-ton Peterbuilt truck and was slowing it down. All he saw was the top of a blonde head, but by-standers, pedestrians and on-lookers from the sidewalk turned with a moments notice and pointed at the red caped figure holding back the garbage truck. It was her!!! The girl from the news and photos and they all saw her too. She was holding back against the grill of the screeching fifty-ton behemoth, one leg back stretched for momentum, all her godly strength channeled forward into the garbage truck. Rising up from the driver's side of her vehicle, Cate Hennessey wanted to run at first then realized what she was watching. With twenty feet shrinking down to two feet, she realized that if this girl was her daughter that she had just saved her life. The truck grill had caved in under its own weight under the young beauty's strength. It was slowing down soon enough but not fast enough. The blonde one in the Supergirl costume pushed her shoulder against the dragging disposal truck and exerted more of her strength to it. The massive mechanical behemoth finally lurched to a stop with a vast shudder. She felt the side of her mother's car in her back just a second more from calamity.

"Bridget??!!!" Cate recognized her daughter. Bridget whirled round in shock and recognized her mother. Oh god, not here, not like this. People around her cheered at her feat of strength and began taking her picture with their mobile phones.

"I'm sorry…" Bridget suddenly made a face of confusion. "I think you've confused me with someone else…" She turned her head up as her body lifted up off the ground and propelled her skyward. Lionel Bruce was too amazed to say anything. He cocked his head skyward watching the young girl ascending as well. At twenty feet above, Bridget reached to steer her flight and swung into the direction of her home. Confused and speechless, Cate looked round trying to figure out what to do and suddenly realized she was standing in a busy road. The light was green and she could pull ahead now. Bruce was looking around asking for witnesses. The bumper-to-bumper traffic would keep him stranded for a while, but Cate Hennessey could turn off Demonbreun at her easier convenience. Still rattled and trying to understand what she should do, she pulled into the parking lot of the church and stopped her car. She grabbed her cell phone and dialed for home.

"City morgue - you stab them, we slab them." Rory answered it with his usual impropriety.

"Rory!!!" Paul grabbed the phone from him as he chopped vegetables for dinner. "Hello?" He answered it a bit more acceptably.

"Paul! Paul!!!" Cate could barely catch her breath. "Paul!!!"

"Cate, what is it?" He suddenly had a scary thought. "Please tell me you're not pregnant!!!"

"I saw Bridget!!!" She was screaming hysterically. "I saw Bridget!!!"

"Well, I…" Paul looked beyond Rory on the sofa to Bridget coming down the stairs near the kitchen and invading the refrigerator near him without looking up at him. "I see Bridget too." He chuckled at his wife for being so alarmingly melodramatic. Taking a bottle of water from the refrigerator door, the blonde one turned and looked up to her father.

"No, Paul…" Cate was slowly calming down. "I saw our daughter… in her costume…."

"What?!" Paul gutturally voiced the word in shock. Bridget looked at him as she swiped a piece of chopped cauliflower to snack on. "But that's impossible… she's right here!!"

Cate was struck speechless by that realization.

"Put her on…" She beamed connivingly to speak to her daughter. Through the phone, Paul handed it over to his daughter and the would-be costumed crime-fighter chirped her little teenage voice up to her mother over the handheld.

"Hey, mom, what's up?" Bridget took a carrot this time from the vegetables her father was cooking for dinner.

"Bridget…" Cate's voice sounded with a knowing affection to her voice; it was the same tone she had when she had caught her children in a lie. "Where were you a few minutes ago?"

"Where was I supposed to be?" Bridget checked out her fingernails and leaned toward her brother watching her. "Was I supposed to get something?"

"Bridget…" Cate's tone rose a bit. "You were just here on Demonbreun a minute ago. You just stopped a garbage truck with your bare hands!!! I saw you!!!"

"Is that what this is about?" Bridget made a face of frustrated annoyance. "Mom, that girl is not me!!"

"I saw you!!!"

Bridget just rolled her eyes. Her father looked at her from over his boiled vegetables and mashed potatoes. Rory had taken an interest in his sister's side of the conversation and was smiling with the thought she was busted. Paul just listened and mentally debated if he wanted to know or not.

"Yeah, whatever…" The blonde one was tired of these accusations from her family. She just wished they'd forget it.

"Bridget, look…" Cate changed her tone to try and be more understanding. "You can tell me anything. I want to talk about this…." She heard her daughter sighing defeatedly depressed and then the phone clicking off at home.


	9. Chapter 9

"Hi guys…" Cate walked through the front door clad in her hospital scrubs over her black sweater and dark slacks. She looked around first for Bridget then noticed Rory and Kerry sitting on the floor at the table before the TV perusing newspaper clippings and color photos. Kerry had looked up first to acknowledge her mother, but Rory just waved his hand in her direction.

"Hi guys…" Cate draped her jacket over the back of a chair and dropped her purse into the seat. "Where's your sister?"

"Krypton." Rory cracked barely looking up. He mumbled that another of Kyle's photos didn't have enough to tell if it was Bridget or not.

"She's upstairs with dad." Kerry finally gave a decent answer. "Look, mom," She gestured to their clippings and photos. "This is all the photos Kyle had of Bridget in her costume. All of these…" She placed her hand on a stack of snapshots. "Are too blurry to be anything, but these…" She picked up a series of photos. "Are taken from as close as a few feet away and are almost certainly Bridget…"

"Or Jessica Simpson." Rory added. "Or Reese Witherspoon…"

"You suggest any other blonde other than our sister and you're no longer helping me." Kerry shot a look at him.

"Yeah, well…" Cate strided freely into the kitchen and noticed that Paul had been cooking. "I think the whole debate of whether it is or not is about to answered." She took a deep breath ready to call and summon her firstborn daughter before her, but instead heard the fracas coming down the back stairway. She whirled around and saw Paul coming to give her a kiss then noticed Bridget behind him. The blonde one was studying a wad of bandage taped to her finger then looked up with a blank expression to her mother before her.

"Cate, you better check Bridget's finger for me." Paul checked the pork chops in the oven "She cut her finger chopping vegetables and I taped it up, but..."

"Well, that's convenient…" Cate turned to her daughter and took her hand to see inspect the bandage job her husband had done. "Bullets don't hurt you, but you can get a little boo-boo?"

Rory and Kerry turned their heads up to the confrontation.

"Yeah, whatever…" Bridget didn't bother debating it. "No matter what I say you won't believe me. Go ahead and think what you want, but leave me out of it…." Her voice was tired of this subject. She turned to head toward the sofa and noticed Kerry and Rory grinning toward her. They had her. They had her good. Rolling her eyes with a slight sigh, the former blonde sex symbol and self-centered teen exhaled depressed and sadly shook her head turning up the back stairway.

"Cate," Paul was pulling out silverware and plates to set for dinner. "Was it really Bridget?"

"Paul… I know my daughter when I see her!" She was adamant about this. "It was her."

"Mom…" Kerry had stood up on her feet and come up behind her parents. "This is the only clear picture of Bridget in the costume I could find from Kyle's collection. Granted, it was taken from almost two hundred feet away with a cheap Polaroid, but… I'd swear it was Bridget." Paul took the clipping.

"It looks like Reese Witherspoon…" He commented as mother and daughter both glared at him.

"Or Jessica Simpson…."

"The suspicious thing is…" Kerry glared exasperatingly from her father to her brother. "That since last week no one has been able to get another close-up photo of her. Somehow, she can knock out any photographic device within a few feet of her."

"Where'd you hear that?" Paul wondered about that.

"Kyle told me." Kerry answered. "He knows at least two guys who almost got decent pictures of her, but as soon as they start zooming in on her with their picture phones, their batteries goes dead."

"Look…" Cate lightly braced on the kitchen cabinet. "I don't want to bust Bridget's secret identity, I just want her to be truthful about it."

"When was the last time Bridget was anything but truthful?" Paul reacted condescendingly sarcastic. Truthfully, Bridget's attitude had changed in the last week since her seizure. It had been a while since he had to listen to Bridget raving about herself; she seemed to have lost all those materialistic idiosyncrasies and was no longer obsessed with just herself and fashion. He wondered about that fact from the back of his mind. Maybe, just maybe, he did now have the perfect daughter, but could it be possible that she was now much more than the girl she used to be?

Cate just turned and stomped her feet up the stairs of the back stairs to her daughter's bedroom. The door was standing open. Bridget was sitting curled up on her bed painting her toe nails bright pink. As she blew on them, she became conscious she was being watched and turned her head toward her mother in the doorway. Her long blonde locks cascaded from her shoulder as she looked up with her big blue eyes. Those round emotional eyes of hers had not changed since she was a child.

"Bridget," Cate stepped forward clad in her light blue hospital scrubs. "We need to talk."

"About me?" Bridget turned to her toes again. "Or her…"

"Bridget…" Cate stood her ground. "I saw you!" She heard a frustrated groaning noise from her firstborn.

"God…." The blonde one barely looked up. "How much does she look like me?"

"Why are you being difficult about this?" Cate sat next to her daughter as the bed frowned under both of them. "I'm not trying to dissect you like some lab experiment… I want to know what happened to you. Bridget… what you're doing, how you're doing it, why you're doing it, please, open up to me!"

"Mom, she's not me!" Bridget stood and faced her mother then shook her head and looked away. "I'm not her." She paused a moment looking for the right thing to say. "I don't know why I'm even trying…. You've already made up your mind based on nothing."

"Bridget," Cate started listing facts off her fingers. "Since last week, you've been coming home early, you've stopped obsessing about yourself, I actually caught you reading something other than Cosmo and you're actually wearing clothing?" She paused right there. "You've got that costume on underneath, don't you?"

"For the love of…" Bridget reached down pulling her long-sleeved shirt off and up over her head to reveal a simple loose lavender chemise underneath it hanging off her bare shoulders. She tossed her shirt on to the floor. "Mom, I've been depressed for the last couple of days. Oh, you didn't notice that!" Her voice was becoming aggravatingly offended. "Kyle and I have broken up, Jenna Green has been turning all my best friends against me and just last week, my favorite coffee shop increased the price of their frappuchinos from a buck seventy-five to two-ten and on top of it, my family thinks I'm some sort of mutant from the planet Crichton."

"Krypton."

"Whatever!" Bridget turned away and placed her left hand to her forehead as if she had a headache. "So… don't accuse me of anything I'm not when you're obviously too busy to figure out what is actually going on." Bridget drew silent for the moment. Her jaw dropping slightly, Cate gasped for a minute and pretended to look away then looked up to her daughter's back.

"Why didn't you just tell me what was going on your life?"

"When would I have had a chance…" Bridget reached her hand up to her face and seemingly hid her tears. "You're always working."

"Look," Reacting from that verbal barrage, Cate stood up a bit overwhelmed and unprepared for this conversation. "I will…" She looked for the right words. "Concede… for the moment that that girl in the news might not be you, but to tell the truth, the fact that she could be scares the crap out of me; however…" She gestured to get Bridget's attention. "You got to admit your recent personality change had a lot to do with it." She paused again thinking she was a great mother. "But, Beej, you can talk to me anytime no matter what. I mean, there has got to be something I can do for you to get you out of this mood."

"Well…" The young girl thought for something she really wanted. "I'd sure love to get a long good soak in your big bathtub… with your herbal shampoo, oils and cucumbers on my eyes and all."

"That sounds like the old Bridget!" Cate forced a grin and turned to hug her daughter. Bridget perked up as well. But in her mind, she realized that this was not the end of these accusations. Kerry was determined to bust her and Rory wanted something out of it. Both of them over dinner faked polite family chatter, but the long lingering glances wondering the truth carried hidden meanings. All Bridget could do was sigh, roll her eyes and change the subject when Kerry started to bring up things in the news or Rory tried to point out that Bridget was not being Bridget anymore. She needed an incident to convince them that it just wasn't possible.

After dinner, Bridget reminded her mother of her promise and Cate went to draw a hot bath for her daughter within her bathroom off the master bedroom. She left out her bath oils and bath salts, waved the waters into thick and perfumed sudsy foam and then looked up to Bridget bringing the cucumber slices for placing over her eyes. The teenage girl was trussed up within her long bathrobe with her bare feet sticking out from under it.

"Bridget," Cate warned her. "You have to be careful not to fall asleep in the tub."

"Of course…" The blonde one rolled her eyes against the parental transgression.

"I mean it…" Cate stepped back as Bridget sat on the rim of the large tub. "I sometimes use an alarm clock to keep me alert or even music."

"I've got it covered." She revealed her CD player. "Josh Groban…"

"Okay…" Cate motioned for the door of the bathroom and looked back to her daughter.

"Oh, mom…" Bridget tested the water temperature with her fingers. "Lock the door so dad doesn't forget and accidentally wander in."

"Right." Cate beamed lovingly and turned the lock on the door as she pulled it closed. Hearing the sound of the door latching, Bridget wafted her right hand once more through the soapy and perfumed water and turned off the faucet with her left hand. Stepping up on to her feet once more, her head tilted to the mirror and she reached up to the top of her bathrobe, loosening it, and letting it fall to her feet to reveal her pastel blue and red costume under it. Her cape tucked into the back of her belt and her stocking boots stuffed into the deep pockets of her robe. Her hands reached behind her and unfurled her cape falling languidly to the floor before pulling her boots out from her robe. She opened the narrow window of her parent's bathroom window and felt gravity slipping away from her body as she started levitating up and out of the house into the night sky. A curled band-aid dropped from the finger of one hand devoid of cuts. Upon clearing the height of the house, her bright blue eyes noticed the lights of town, turned to reach out to them, and propelled forward on the wings of the wind carrying her toward her new adventure.


	10. Chapter 10

"Dad," Rory wandered over to his father. "I'm concerned. Bridget's still out late and it's almost ten o'clock."

"Rory," Paul rolled his chair round from the computer. "You sister didn't go out. She's still upstairs."

"Oh yeah…" Rory realized his confusion. "Sorry, force of habit…" He started to turn away, then thought of something and turned back to his father. "Are you sure she's up there?"

Paul reached out to smack him out of annoyance without hurting him and Rory jumped out of the reach of his arm.

"I mean," Rory looked to Kerry sorting the Supergirl pictures from Kyle's collection and the newspaper then back to his father. "Maybe we ought to turn on the news to keep an eye on her. She's up to a hundred and twenty-three sightings so far."

"Thanks for reminding me." Kerry determinedly and eagerly switched the channel over to a network for the local TV news and scrambled to record it to be prepared just in case the news did feature another sighting.

"I cannot believe you two." Cate sat curled up on the sofa with a book, relishing her night off with a Danielle Steele novel and a hot cup of coca. "I will have you know that your sister is home tonight and in my bathtub taking a long relaxing soak." She paused to take a sip of her cocoa. "And besides, even she could not be stupid enough to vanish from this house while we are so close to busting her."

"Cate…" Paul whiled around partially from the computer trying to sway her back to his mindset. "What did we agree to the other night? We don't have enough evidence. There is no possible way our dear sweet Beej could possibly be… Kerry, turn the volume up so I can hear it."

Kerry made a face determined to bust her sister and beamed privately picturing the look in Bridget's face when they got the truth out of her. On some level, she didn't want to know, but then she just wanted to be a part of the secret. If Detroit's reported unsolved mystery appeared on the news and Bridget was home, it was all over there; Bridget had been telling the truth. However, if there were no sightings tonight then it might mean that Bridget might have forsaken whatever superhuman gifts she now had for the night and they had more evidence it was actually her. Switching channels from Discovery Channel to the local ABC network, the family's chosen regular local news outlet, Kerry missed the opening montage and caught the cusp end of the opening story for the night.

"…had no official comment." Head anchor John Cage reported the news. "Two blocks of Lafayette Street are closed down tonight as police and rescue teams monitor a possible jumper on the top floor of the Ritter Building in downtown Detroit. The structure was built in 1899 and since being used as a school, it now houses many of the cities' legislative offices including human services and twelve lawyer's offices. After James Gregory Kent, 39, an unemployed grocery clerk was refused state health and financial services, he climbed out on the ledge of the building screaming that he was going to jump rather than live his life without the financial support he believed was due him. Cursing at God, the world and his otherwise uncaring relatives, Kent was almost pulled in an hour ago as the footage shows…"

Footage on the TV showed Kent skirting attempts to be rescued as the downdraft from TV news helicopters nearly blew him off the building.

"But the police involvement has only made his status even more desperate as he has managed to climb up even higher up on the roof, where he is now clutching on to a pipe for safety. Human services refused to give a comment, but the police will drop any charges they have on Kent if he gives up willingly. We will keep you updated as this story continues.

"As denizens of Detroit have been aware of for almost a month, we're being haunted. No, not by ghosts, but a seemingly angelic blonde presence in red and blue who up close looks remarkably like the character of Supergirl, one of the trademark characters from the DC Comics series of comic books, even right down to the familiar red and yellow "S" emblazoned across her chest."

"She was so hot!!" A series of teenagers started screaming in a montage of clips.

"I saw her flying over the courthouse."

"I think she goes to my school!"

"No, she goes to my school!" Kerry told the TV. "I even share my bathroom with her!"

"My best friend saw her tossing over a truck over on Monroe Street." A televised young girl replied. "Just as the police arrived, she sailed up into the sky. I later learned the guys in the truck had sped through a stoplight trying to escape the police."

"She plucked my daughter out of traffic!"

"I've seen her over the Highland Park area a lot."

"Supergirl, will you marry me?!"

"As if her ego wasn't big enough…" Rory stared at all the TV coverage from past stories. "Wait a second, we haven't heard from Bridget's ego in a while have we?"

"No, we haven't…" Kerry looked to him and reflected on that fact. "Isn't it interesting?"

"Officially, the police department has nothing to say about these alleged sightings," Cage returned to the screen with the familiar icon of the Kryptonian superhero in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. "However, they have to admit that street gang activity has decreased in Detroit by at least twenty percent and they now have eighty percent of all local wanted felons off the streets or in the hospital after experiencing flipped over vehicles or… underwear burn."

Paul cringed a bit in his seat. According to the morning newspaper, a deadbeat dad from out of Milwaukee was found hanging off a radio tower by the band in his underwear. No one knew how he got three hundred feet into the air, but when he got down, the former Point Place native was screaming about flying blonde that had thrown him around as if he were a toy.

"However, one Manhattan police detective would like to believe that our lone possible female superhero possibly exists." Cage continued. "Lieutenant Ed O'Neil has been with the New York City Police Department for forty years and has been a bit of a maverick known for using psychics and mediums for solving unsolvable murder cases, but now, he's been turning to our own possibly extra-terrestrial comic cutie to try and get her help in another case at the top of his books. Since last night, O'Neil has been shining a searchlight with a red comic book symbol painted on it into the sky and aiming it eastward toward Detroit in trying to get her attention."

"In 1998," O'Neil appeared in the Detroit news. "An unidentified party attacked, raped and murdered seven young girls within the span of three weeks using the same M.O. within Central Park before he vanished. I have talked to three witnesses and two psychics who have given me leads to follow, and yet, this creep still runs loose. I will not retire until I have this waste of a human life off the street and closure for the families of the victims."

"Oh, gee, you think we should tell Bridget about this?" Rory looked to Kerry.

"But why would we do that?" Kerry regressed back to being condescending sarcastic. "I mean… our sister's just a typical stuck-up and materialistic prima donna…" She looked to her mother. "Or she used to be…." Cate just stared down to her daughter and tried to scoff at the notion.

"Lt. O'Neil has tried to contact the young heroine through the Detroit police force, but they have not been able to complete the request."

"Now, John…" Cage's co-anchor, Ashley Clarkson, commented on the story. "I've been hearing a lot about this girl and what she's supposedly been doing, but why can't we just get a picture of her to prove she exists?"

"Good question, Ashley," John turned to her. "Now, from what I understand, for the first three days of her appearances, we know the newspapers were buying up all the pictures they could get of her, but as late, no one has been able to get a good photo of her. Rumor has it she can drain camera batteries and prevent herself from being photographed. The Detroit Tribune is offering $2000 for a decent up close photo of her."

"Cate," Paul turned to his rave-haired wife. "We still got film in the family camera, don't we?"

"Yeah, we still got a few frames left over from…." Cate realized what he was thinking. "Paul, busting Bridget is one thing. Outing her identity to the world is another thing!"

"I could superimpose her face on to Helen Slater's body." Rory spoke up referring to the one actress to have actually played the role and also to have worn the costume.

"I'm sure the newspaper is smarter than that." Kerry stabbed his idea before he got to far before rolling her eyes back to the TV.

"Well, that's one way to protect your secret identity." Ashley commented on TV. "Might want to start getting ready for winter, we got a cold… Wait, we're getting a new update from the Ritter building jumper where our own Katey Bundy is on the scene." She changed her routine for the new story. "Katey, can you tell us what's happening?"

"Did we get her? Are you sure we got her?" The Christina Applegate look-alike spoke up bundled up from the weather at the news line across the street at the Ritter Building then realized she was on the air. "Ashley, just a moment ago, a police negotiator dangling from a police helicopter tried to pluck Kent off the roof but he slipped and knocked himself and Kent off the steep roof. Just as that happened, a red streak swept over our heads and caught both men, depositing them safely at the end of the block well away from our cameras!"

The Hennessy family in unison lowered their heads and dropped their mouths open.

"I guess that's sighting hundred and twenty four for us." Katey jumped excitedly with the field report. "Back to you."

"She played me!!!" Cate screeched and spun around the end of the living room sofa as she launched to her feet. "I had her, and she played me! Depressed, my ass!"

"Cate, calm down!" Paul rushed to stop her at the foot of the stairs.

"Yeah, mom," Rory jumped up ready to confront Bridget. "I hear she's bulletproof now." He smirked being funny. "I wouldn't want to break my hand trying to hit her."

"Rory!!!"

"Mom, " Kerry had to get her little comment in as well. "You don't want to go up there without kryptonite handy!"

"Kerry!" Paul faced his daughter as Cate rushed past him and up to her bathroom upstairs above the living room. Her spirit was determined, her trust was broken and her maternal self was desperate. With her husband and other progeny behind her, she quietly and unwaveringly marched into her bedroom, her fingers reaching into a ceramic pot in the room off her bedroom and held up the ring of extra keys for the house. One key unlocked her bathroom.

"Cate," Paul caught up to her. "I want you to calm down." He tried to dissuade her thoughts with a look of compassion.

"I am calm!" Cate snapped at him under her breath. "Bridget is my daughter, and I got to know." She unlocked the door. "And I believe my daughter is not in this…" She swung the door open, took two steps and saw her daughter's face floating in the water under the suds. "Bridget?"

"Huh… what?" The blond one opened her eyes and sunk under the water. There was nothing but an unbroken layer of foam for a moment and then she lifted her head up. "Mom?!" She looked around a moment. "Did I fall asleep?'

Kerry walked in, saw her sister floating under the water and cursed under breath. Foiled again! She turned back out past her father and brother standing outside the room.

"Bridget," Cate had to know the truth. "Did you leave this house tonight?" Bridget reacted confused and violated as she tried to understand where this question was coming.

"What?!" She tried to discreetly cover herself up in the foamy and soapy water. "You mean like this?!"

"Never mind…" Cate seemed to find her answer. "Sorry, honey… you just… enjoy your bath… You might want to get out before you prune up." She gasped, placed her right hand to her head and tried to stroll out of embarrassment. Her feeling was awkward, the situation was embarrassing and the moment anticlimactic. Her emotions were vented now. Cate could just grit her teeth together feeling ashamed of what she was doing.

"Sorry, Beej…" Paul covered his eyes as he reached to the door and pulled it shut. There was a sound of Cate the mom hailing herself for thinking what she did and Paul trying to comfort her. Kerry screeched frustratedly through the house and Rory started spouting the facts behind the would-be confrontation. The family was getting even more confused. Was Bridget secretly a superhuman protector for the city, or had she just merely changed in her attitude for the better?

Lifting herself up from out of the bath, Bridget braced herself on the sides of the tub as she reared her body up from out of the water, torrents of water poured down out from the costume she was wearing hidden under the foam. The soapy scented bath had covered it entirely, but had saturated it down to a second layer of skin. Her cape hung straight, drops and rivulets of water pouring from its corners. Bath water still pouring out of her ever body crevice, Bridget put one foot on to the floor and placed her hand against the door, her other hand pulling her wet hair out of her face. She hoped this outfit would not shrink in the downstairs dryer. Forget that, she'd use the Laundromat. It was more private.

"I've got to get my own place." She whispered to herself.


	11. Chapter 11

11

"You look incredible." Steven Danvers sat in a booth at the Italian Bar and Grill in Detroit's eatery district. Bridget sat down before him in a black turtle-necked sweater and a long green skirt. A gold locket hung from her neck and her long hair had been brushed out long, cascading and flowing over her shoulders. She was beyond beautiful; she was exquisite. She could have been a movie star with those looks. Her bluer-than-blue eyes looked up to him with a godly and regal presence, and her dainty lips, lined with red lipstick, were drawn silent as her mind processed the praise he rained on her.

"Thanks…"

"We're finally alone together." Steven felt just a bit intimidated by her. Bridget was so out of his league, but after weeks of mustering his confidence, he finally had a date with her, and now, a second date. She was less talkative than their first date together. The last time together, Bridget had encouraged him to go to the mall to meet her friends, but this time, she was not quite as self-absorbed and much less self-involved. It was almost as if she were a new person. She seemed to genuinely want to be with him. He offered to take her to dinner and she accepted. She sat quietly listening as he talked about basketball and his after-school job, and didn't interrupt him once this time to talk on her cell phone. He liked this new Bridget Hennessy.

"You are hard to pin down these days." He continued.

"I am so much busier than I once was." Bridget spoke more eloquently and succinctly than Steven recalled. "You won't believe how much running around I'm doing plus Kerry is driving me nuts insinuating all this crazy stuff about my life." She lifted her Diet Pepsi to take a sip.

"Like what?"

"Oh, it's way too embarrassing…" Bridget didn't want to stick that thought in his head much less discuss that person. "So, how is the basketball team going? You think we're going to win over the Collinsport Cougars this time?"

"I think we have a really good shot this year." Steven continued. "Coach is running us ragged with exercises and new plays plus we got rid of Jesse Spanjers. You know he failed his biology test – he was like the worst guy on the team…"

There was another voice present. "I can't believe you're saying this in the restaurant…"

Bridget lightly looked over to another table as she started hearing other voices in the building. Pretending to listen to Steven, her mind began diffusing through the articulated banter and conversations of other people around her that her senses could detect. Not much interested in basketball in the least, she continued trying to be the courteous listener, occasionally stroking her hair or nodding her head, but something had sparked her interest. Resonating on wavelengths and frequencies around her, her nearly clairvoyant senses began shifting for the line of dialogue that had sparked her subconscious attention. Each voice she heard coming from somewhere in a five mile radius.

"Baby, it's not you, it's me…"

"Tell me again why we brought the kids with us?"

"Table Five wants even more bread?"

"Dad, are you sure Bridget is out on a date?"

"Kyle, stop grieving over Bridget and move on!"

"Donny, I hear Bridget's dating now…"

"Hey, your house still has Xmas decorations on it, right?"

"That's your kid, not mine…"

"Perp is now on foot near Cole and Decatur heading to Addison…."

"…. Can't believe how he ate the whole thing," Steven continued talking as Bridget woke from her subliminal cruise through the undetectable audio spectrum. "My dad wanted to take him to the vet, but mom just gave Buster vinegar in his water, and he coughed up the whole…"

"Steven…" Bridget interrupted him a minute. "Could you excuse me a minute? I want to freshen up before eating."

"Yeah, sure…" Steven lightly rose as Bridget stood and stepped out of the booth. He beamed like a lucky guy to be on a date with her, and she shined toward him as well, glowing even more beautiful. She turned slowly for the restrooms then noticed Steven sitting back down and looking away to the waitresses and in that second, she quickly dashed beyond the hostess podium and out the front door of the restaurant. Turning his gaze back, Steven looked back to the restrooms and saw no sight of Bridget. By his judgment, she had to be now in the restroom freshening her appearance. The waitress glided up and blocked his view.

"Are you ready to order?" Waitress Amanda Jennings wore a white blouse and black skirt with a brown apron embroidered with the Italian Grill name on it. Her dark hair was pulled into a ponytail as per the restaurant codes. She held up a yellow order pad with a black ballpoint pen.

"We'll each have a spaghetti dinner…" Steven looked back to the menu. "I'll have a small pepperoni pizza on the side with mushrooms and black olives and she wants a chef salad."

"Dressing?"

"Uh, I don't…." He looked for Bridget to return. "Uh, get her Italian… Ranch, maybe." He heard a flurry of sirens outside the window over his booth and turned to the site of police cars racing toward Addison at the nearby crossroads. Something was going on to upset the local police. Letting it slip from his attention, he turned back to the waitress.

"I'll bring her a variety." Amanda offered.

"Thanks," Steven gasped wondering about where this date was going. "Oh, and another Pepsi for myself and more bread."

"Be up in about seven minutes." Amanda collected the menus and Steven sat back to wait for Bridget.

"Steven Danvers?"

"Lisa?" Steven looked over to the source of the voice. It was Lisa Castellari from school. She and a group of girls he didn't recognize were at a table on the elevated sitting area in the middle of the dining room. She had long hair somewhere between blonde and light brown and garbed in a tank top and hip-hugging jeans. He had two classes with her, but he really didn't care much about her. Lisa was the reason a number of female classmates went on diets or went to therapy or male classmates were forced into empty relationships. They were good students, fair people but ruthless rumor creators. They pretended to be Bridget's friends when they wanted to reach up to her level, but they tore apart anyone who was poor, unlucky or just different.

"Don't tell me you're here by yourself." She stood above the basketball jock with her bust size hanging over him, knowing it turned the gentleman in him into a young boy.

"No," Steven looked away as a new waitress brought him another drink and more bread then departed. He took his new drink and sipped it. "I'm here with Bridget. She's in the restroom."

"Bridget Hennessy?" That affected Lisa's tone a bit. "Oh, honey, I don't want to break your heart, but I was just in the restroom, and there's no one in there."

"What?" He didn't want to believe it.

"Baby…" Lisa sat in Bridget's place. "I'd hate to have to tell you this, but Bridget is just a pretender. She doesn't go for nice guys like yourself. She goes for the bad boys. Please… Don't delude yourself by thinking you have a chance with her. Forget her and join me, Jenna, Amy and the girls."

"I don't…" Steven pretended to be distracted. He looked away hurt and dejected and forced a deep breath trying to keep from being too sensitive. "No, I'm just going to bail."

"Suit yourself…" Lisa rose up out of the booth to return to her friends. "But you're more than welcome to join us."

"Yeah, whatever…" Steven started looking round for his original waitress to cancel his order. A few drinks, some bread, he'd only lost a few dollars. Lisa and her coven shrieked laughing from their table as Lisa pulled out her chair to sit down. A gush of wind swung the hanging decorations of the dining room and the chair jumped aside and Lisa found herself hitting the floor. A waitress clung to her platter to keep from dropping an order and a dining patron lost his cigarette from his mouth.

"Sorry, it took so long…" Bridget appeared from nowhere and scooted into her seat in the booth. "I almost ran into Lisa Castellari in the restroom and had to hide in the stall to avoid her." She claimed nonchalantly. "She is such a pretender, you know." She sipped her soda. Steven was looking back and forth from her to the restrooms in confusion.

"I know…" Steven looked at Bridget then back to Lisa lifting herself off the floor. "She was just over here saying the same thing about you!"

"My god…" Bridget lightly shook her head. "She is just believable." Her right hand rose to brush her long hair back, but as she did so, something metal in her long locks fell out and hit the table, dancing and skimming up to under the rim of the empty wicker bread basket before them. Bridget's eyes rounded in shock as Steven reached to pick it up from her. It was a hollow copper-jacketed bullet with a steel tip had tumbled from her body. It was halfway pristine, but the tip was crushed and flattened as if it'd been fired into something harder than steel.

"It looks like an armor piercing shell." Steven knew his bullets from his father's old military books. He looked back at her a bit confused. "Look at how far it's impacted…"

"I found it." Bridget quickly improvised. "Last week, you know, that location where that figure everyone is calling Supergirl flipped over the SUV on Decatur." She leaned over the table dramatically. "I think it bounced off of her."

"Whoa…" Steven sat back in his seat. "You know, I think I know who she is."

"Who?" Bridget made a face like a deer in headlights.

"There's this incredible-looking blonde lady who moved into the house across the street from my dad." Steven started speaking covertly. "She looks almost exactly like Scarlet Johansson, and she appeared just before all these sightings started. I think it's her."

"I think you could be right." She echoed slightly over her breath. Steven started giving her the bullet back.

"No, keep it…" She insisted. "I was going to give it to my brother, but he's been such a brat lately…"

"Thanks…" Steven beamed his steeling grin to Bridget. She was shining back to him as well before noticing Lisa and her friends at their table.

"Oh, hello, Lisa…" The blonde one waved cheerfully. Lisa and the coven pretended to care by just barely acknowledging her back.

"Why does she have to stick them so high?!" The police department blocked off part of Addison and looked up to their burglary suspect hanging by his underwear waistband on the cell phone tower off Addison and Main Street. The perp wasn't talking. He was in too much pain. One minute, he was home clear and then he saw that blonde figure charging at him from out of the darkness. He had fired upon her, but it didn't slow her down. Next thing he knew, he was pulled off his feet and then hung up by his underwear on the tower. Looking down upon the city block, he looked down upon the police cars and officers looking up at him. In the distance, the fire truck with the long ladder came to bring him down.

Departing the late shift at the hospital, Cate Hennessy drove by the snarled traffic and officers guiding cars past the spectacle. She could only look at the scene of the figure hung up to dry and mumble the name of her daughter under breath. She wasn't sure if she believed anymore it was Bridget, but she wasn't sure if she believed it wasn't. There was evidence to suggest both ways, but which was right and which wasn't. She wasn't going to play the game anymore. If it weren't Bridget, Cate would still love her daughter, but if it were proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, that was when she'd spring on the girl with a vengeance.

Reaching home, she pulled into the driveway and parked even to the sidewalk rather than pulling into the garage. Tired, a bit hungry and the memories of the hospital still coursing through her mind, Cate took her purse from the passenger seat out of continued habit and swung the car door shut behind her. Her feet took the same path over the asphalt driveway, up the cobblestone walkway past Rory's bicycle dumped against the bushes and then hopping up onto the open wood porch. She tested the front door to see if it was unlocked, turning it easily and pushing through the opening door.

"Paul?" Cate entered her darkened home slowly. "Why are you sitting in the dark?"

"Sit by me, Cate." He answered to her.

"Oh no," She dropped her purse in the chair and hastened over to his side. "Your doctor's appointment. What did John say? Did you tell him Bridget wanted you to get a cardio-pulmonary arthroscopy of the aorta?" She chuckled at the notion.

"Yeah," Paul turned off the game on the TV. "And he agreed."

She dropped her jaw and looked at him in mild shock.

"He listened to my heart, Cate, and heard something he didn't like." Paul gasped, grasped his chin in his fingertips, briefly looked away and leaned forward to his lovely wife, taking her hands in his own. "He didn't like it so much that he brought in three doctors to hear my heart and the resident cardiologist. It seems that I might have some sort of… flaw – a dissection that could be getting worse." Cate covered her mouth in shock at the news. "They're putting me on special medicine and a special diet, but I have to take it easy. I've got a date for surgery next month. They're going to put a valve in me that should cover the defect."

"Oh my god, Paul." Cate pulled him closer.

"How did she know?" Paul asked out loud. "Somehow Bridget knew about it. How could she notice something that anyone else could barely detect?"

"That girl is really starting to scare me." Cate responded, placing her hand to her chest. "Her personality has changed, she's gotten smart, practically genius-level! There's all those you-know-what in the news. I wonder if Kerry and Rory might have something in their crazy stories."

"Where is that girl anyway?" Paul wondered.

Forty miles down Interstate 12, the state and local police were pursuing car thieves in a Ford SUV. The vehicle had a larger engine block than the patrol cars and could out run them, but it could not out run the police helicopter overhead. Two side tires had been blown away from spike strips and they were still reaching eighty miles per hour through the evening traffic on the highway running from the pulsating volley of red and blue lights behind them. One distraction car had staved off three patrol cars and wrecked a fourth, but now the lawful-impaired driver and his armed lookout had to content with two highway patrol cars and one local police car. Shells from an illegal AK-47 echoed through the night as officers ducked behind their steering wheels from bullets piercing the night. There was no way these officers were going to let a group of under-educated and illiterate high school drop-outs think that breaking the law was acceptable. They'd have to try yet another pit maneuver to take out the already damaged SUV. If it didn't roll, it would explode from the gas tank scraping the asphalt highway.

Delusional in the thought that he could still escape the law, Eldon Browerman kept his foot to the metal and wished he had stolen an SUV with a full tank of gas. He wasn't sure how long his last two wheels would hold, but his brother, Arthur, was still firing out the passenger door trying to preserve their criminal career. They had been on America's Most Wanted and had been on Detroit's top ten for three years. They had hoped that that was warning enough that they should not be messed with, but there was no way they were going back to prison. Stealing cars would get him a few years, but shooting at the cops was a definite life sentence. Even if he rolled this stolen vehicle, he could probably escape into the woods if he had to, but first he needed to make his freedom a certainty. As his eyes looked forward, he suddenly saw a figure in his path. Not interested in veering round it, he planned on slamming through her for being stupid enough to get in his way, but then he saw her too clearly too late. Her blonde hair, her bright blue costume in his headlights, the big red letter shaping her bosom…

Next thing he knew he was he was flying through the windshield and hitting the asphalt with his chest. The front of the SUV had caved in, pushing the engine through the middle of the cab. It felt like hitting a brick wall built across the highway. His brother dropped his gun and rolled a few feet into the ditch. Eldon lifted his bald head trying to get his breath back and looked to the girl in the red cape over him bending the stolen AK into bent metal components and tossing it away, but he was not going down because of some female reject from a comic convention. He stumbled and scrambled to his feet and tried to take a swing at her.

When the police cars finally stopped, they found Eldon and Arthur Browerman sitting in the center of the road, the tempered steel bumper from the stolen vehicle bent in an improvised shackle around their bodies. Dizzy, angry and delirious, they were at the center of multiple patrol cars stopping round them, revolvers being aimed at them and the ruins of a totaled SUV upside down at roadside. Their heads meanwhile turned up in unison to the strange blonde presence vanishing into the night sky returning to her date...


	12. Chapter 12

12

"Unless you've been in a cave for ten years," John Walsh spoke from the TV-series, _America's Most Wanted_. "You probably aren't aware that Detroit is now being protected by a one-woman strike force. That's right, I said a one-woman strike force. A plucky young blonde wearing a "Supergirl" costume has been popping up all over the Motor City saving people and fighting crime. I'm not sure if I believe half the stuff they claim she's been doing, but I just got to say well done to this young lady and keep up the good job. She comes into us with Capture 978: Eldon Luther Browerman whose been stealing cars and shooting at police between Chicago and Detroit and all over the Great Lakes area."

"I'm going to kill that blonde…" Browerman's rant was censored over network TV.

The real-life Supergirl was popping up all over the area. Two verified sightings in Ann Arbor, a few across the bay over in Windsor, Canada. There were a few debated sightings in Toledo, Ohio and footage taken of the flying female twenty miles out over Lake Erie. DC Comics cancelled their cease-and-desist order against the Detroit police after their sales for their Superman comics with Supergirl started going through the roof. Marvel Comics jumped on the bandwagon with a Supergirl/Wolverine crossover followed by a Spiderman/Supergirl. There were talks of the female character being added to the "_Smallville_" TV series.

"It's her!!!" Random by-standers would scream when she soared over Detroit. The people who didn't believe in her looked up, but her believers carried cameras trying to get her on film. She was seen a lot along Interstate 94 and around Patton Memorial Park. Rumor was she hid her civilian clothes in a tomb at Holy Cross Cemetery. Most public of the rumors claimed that was really at least eleven different women in town and despite a battery of police-authorized tests, each of these women remained unconfirmed. As police forensics tried to explain how tempered steel could be bent by human hands and how a young girl could fly through the air, a young local actress named Amber Tisdale claimed she was really Supergirl to the press and nearly received the key to the city, but she was busted when the real thing at the exact same time rescued fishermen off their sinking boat twelve miles off the Michigan coast in Lake Superior.

"Girls!" Nurse Nancy Gordon screeched into the nurse's station at St. Thomas Hospital. "She's here!!"

"Who?" Dr. Masterson sipped her coffee and looked to Cate and the nurses on break.

"Her!!!"

Everyone stormed out at once and an old man on an oxygen tank stopped and watched from his seat. The strangely clad beauty in the red cape and short pleated skirt was carrying in an emergency case. The accident victim was from a smashed car off Highway 102. Both his legs were shattered and he had breathing trouble from impact to the chest. Bridget marched him in her arms into the Emergency Ward and placed him onto an empty gurney. Doctor John Dorian saw the young blonde superhuman out the corner of his eyes and only from behind, but her stature and presence seemed oddly familiar. His attention was more to the patient.

"Compound breaks to both legs and internal trauma." Bridget lightly dropped off the young man in her arms onto the gurney and turned quickly to avoid her mother. She hastened quickly back out from the stunned and awkward silence and looked back to the sky, her feet departing earth again. The only thing Cate saw as she rushed round the corner was the brief image of a red caped young blonde outside the building on the entrance into emergency and the same exact image lifting into the sky. She rushed out after her trying to pull that girl down to earth to confront her but missed her by a few feet.

"Get your ass back here, young lady!!!" She saw the figure vanishing over the insurance building next door.

Rory had other plans to bust Bridget. He had used the old car battery to explode his miniature volcano for school; it had been quite successful. Maybe too successful, it had seriously burned three kids, a substitute teacher and nearly burned down his classroom. Salvaging the battery, he carried it up to his sister's room and took it into the room. Lying across her bed reading Emily Dickinson, Kerry looked up to her brother with the battery. He had two wires from it and was soldering one wire to the inside of the doorknob ad then pushing the other wire through the keyhole to the other side.

"Rory," Kerry tossed her long curly locks to her left shoulder. "What are you doing?"

"Well," He looked up to her from the floor with a mission. "You're not doing anything so I'm setting up a "Bust-Bridget" trap. You see," He demonstrated with a screwdriver as a pointer. "You have the exact same doorknob I do. Twisting it makes a metal-on-metal contact. I've got enough juice here to seriously shock a normal person. If Bridget is normal, she'll lose feeling in her hand for a while, but if she's not…"

"It won't affect her!" Kerry grinned with her eyes lighting up. "That's brilliant."

"If this doesn't work, I'm ordering kryptonite from a catalog." He added with a smarmy gleam to his grinning face.

"Once again you apparently confirm genius is only passed along the women in the family." Kerry rolled her eyes at his idiot remark. "Want some help?"

"Hold this…" He had Kerry hold a wire as he soldered it to the base plate. They heard a sound from downstairs, their father coming into the house and then Bridget in the down the stairs from them in kitchen. She told their father that mom wasn't home yet and that Kerry was upstairs reading. She didn't know where Rory was. From the sound, it appeared someone was coming up the front stairs. Rory quickly soldered as Kerry stood as lookout. Waving the fingernail polish dry on her fingers, Bridget came round the end of the corner coming toward them. Reaching her fingers under the bottom of the door to keep from getting electrocuted, Kerry pulled her bedroom door shut with her and Rory outside the room. Bridget strolled up with her attention to her brand new pink fingernails and looked up to her siblings now standing up before her.

"What's going on here?" She asked.

"Nothing." Rory claimed.

"Just talking…" Kerry had a knowing little grin.

Bridget looked at her suspiciously and turned to Rory. He had the same cat-swallowed-the-canary-grin-about him as well. Blowing her nails dry, Bridget wondered what mischief they were up to.

"Rory, get the door for me…" She asked.

"Sure…" He suddenly screamed from his hand completing the circuit through the wired doorknob. He dropped through the open doorway as Bridget jumped back from the sparks off the door. Kerry gritted her teeth in disbelief and hissed under breath before screaming at the stupidity of her brother.

"You are an idiot!!!" Kerry screamed at her brother and turned the other way in disgust, stamping her feet upset down the hall to the main staircase. Bridget noticed the battery and wires on her doorknob and made a noncommittal face as if she did not want to know what was happening. She was sure she didn't want to know. Her hands held aloft as if she were an expert surgeon, Bridget sat down upon to her bed and drew her long legs up on to the bed.

"You're going to clean that up, right?"

"Bridget, please…" Rory held his limp right hand under his left arm. The shock he took felt just slightly above the impact he felt from walking across a wool carpet and touching an iron lamp. "I got to know…" His voice was emotionally assuring and sympathetic. "You have to tell me."

"If this is about a certain flying blonde with a D-cup and a cape, I'm not talking about her." Bridget abruptly stopped that line of talk.

"Bridget," Rory pleaded from the side of the bed. "I have to know. I'm your brother. My powers haven't kicked in, but yours have…"

"Oh my god…" The blonde one couldn't believe she was hearing this and looked away.

"I can help keep your secret." Rory reached out to her conscience. "I wouldn't even tell anyone. You have to tell me, I'm your brother!"

"Rory…" Bridget cringed disgustedly and shook her head in ignominy. "Close the door, I want to talk to you."

"What?" The thirteen-year-old boy's face lit up excitedly and he swung around to close the door. Shocking his left hand this time, he shrieked from the pain and tore his wires loose angrily. Bridget was going to tell him. She was actually going to tell him. His heart started pumping excitedly. His eyes were widened in excitement. He spun on his left foot and sat near his sister ready to hear the truth. Bridget was confessing to him, not Kerry! This was the most exciting day of his life!

"Rory…" Bridget looked into her brother's brown eyes. "I think I figured out who she really is." She whispered. "I think she's really Kerry!"

"What?" The boy's excitement turned to confusion.

"Think about it…" Bridget pretended to be her old self. "If she can fly and lift cars, she must also be able to change how she looks, and who else more than Kerry would want to look exactly like me! It makes so much sense!"

"What?" Rory couldn't think for himself.

"Why else would she be trying to convince you that she's me?" Bridget was using her favorite weapon – confusion! "I mean, think about it, if you were like… I don't know, Spiderman, wouldn't you be like accusing your best friend of your secret identity so no one would ever expect yourself? It makes so much sense!"

"Oh, my god…" Rory sat in stunned silence. "It does make so much sense!"

"Exactly!!!" Bridget was grinning ear-to-ear at how easy it was to manipulate him. "But…" She calmed Rory back to confidentiality. "But we can't confront her over this." She shook her head. "No, we can't." Bridget shook her head and placed her arm around her brother. "We have no idea how powerful she is. I mean, she could turn us into frogs or something."

"I'm scared!"

"I'll protect you." Trying not to laugh, Bridget pulled her baby brother close. "Even if Kerry turned me… oh my god, brunette… I'll fight to keep you from being turned into a frog!"

"I love you, Bridget!" Rory hugged her back.

"I love you too, Froggie!" Bridget was containing her laughter, but it wasn't easy. "Wait, I gotta get to the mall!" She pranced to her feet and grabbed her purse. She turned back to her brother. "But remember… don't tell Kerry! Our lives depend on it!"

"You can depend on me!" Rory turned to the door and grabbed the doorknob, shocking himself again just as the feeling in his hand came back. Swearing at himself, he ripped the last wire loose and grabbed the battery from the floor. He beamed back to his sister with everlasting trust and friendship. Pulling her fall jacket on over her sweater, Bridget looked up to the ceiling and the heavens beyond it.

"I'm not proud of what I just did…" She told the gods in heaven listening. "But sometimes a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do." She grabbed her purse and headed out of her bedroom for the back staircase. In the kitchen, her father was re-heating last night's leftovers and baking chicken to replace last night's stroganoff.

"I'm off to the mall!" She called leaving the house.

"Need any money?" Paul started to reach for his wallet, but Bridget was already gone. He held his wallet aloft. "You missed getting picked clean my friend." He kissed it and returned it to his back pocket.

"You are an idiot!!!" Kerry emerged from the downstairs bathroom. "She's not me!!!"

"Bridget said you'd say that!" Rory confronted her. "We know your insidious secret. You're not turning us into frogs with brunette hair!"

Paul listened to his son and tried to shake that comment from his ears. Did he really just say that?

"Where is this coming from?!" Kerry yelled back at him. "You can't be this stupid! Do you really believe…" Kerry just froze and dawned on what had just happened. "Oh my god, I just figured it out…" Her voice calmed. "I can't believe it. She's playing us…" She turned to her father then back to Rory with her right hand over her lips.

"Kerry?" Paul looked to his middle daughter.

"We are never going to bust her." Kerry thought out loud. "She's not Bridget. She's become smart… she's become… actually clever, almost genius with powers and abilities to boot. It's as if… she's become a new person, someone with an entirely new personality within Bridget's body."

"You mean…" Rory tried to pick up on her line of thinking. "She's possessed or something." He thought it over. "But… she's been doing nothing but helping people."

"I liked your first theory that she had super powers." Paul stirred his pot of Brussels sprouts and snacked on a stalk of celery. "Look, guys, please, please, stop with the cockamamie conspiracy theories. There is nothing wrong with your sister. People change and they do not get superhuman powers like people in the comic books."

In the woods near Patton Park, Bridget raced through the woods running faster and faster until she was practically invisible to human senses. Her hands pulled open the front of her shirt to reveal the red-and-yellow crest across her chest, she stepped out of her skirt with her feet lifting off the earth and stuffed her clothing into her purse, allowing her body lifted up by the mystical ley lines of the planet. A cape flapping from her shoulders, her right arm stretched ahead of her to hold her course, she shot out from the top of the trees shaking them to the branches and roots and disturbing a few birds and squirrels watching this mere mortal gain the status of forgotten gods. Once reaching five hundred feet above the ground, Bridget felt at peace with the world and finally happy with the person was. She drew her right arm back, allowing these ethereal ley lines of the planet pull her along their course with the winds carrying her along. Her long hair wafting and buffeting in her personal jet stream, she looked down content and happy upon a worldview saved only for birds, airplane pilots and the gods up high. Her left hand holding on to her purse strapped over her left shoulder, her eyes perused houses, shops, stores and buildings. A few handfuls of people caught a brief glimpse of her, but for Bridget, she had a brief second to see them and then they were out of her view. A flurry of birds too slow for her scattered and retook formation around her. For her, it was like looking down upon a tremendous model landscape stretching out in all directions. The Detroit skyline was still a steel canyon even at this height as she wafted and dodged around their surly heights with the agility and grace of a floating ballerina dancing through the sky. A few witnesses saw her fly past their twelfth floor offices, but by time they turned around, the real life maiden of might was already gone.

Coming up on the mall, Bridget stopped and hovered high above Addison Street beneath her. She had heard a crashing sound behind her. She turned her head over beyond the store tops and panned along distant Schuster Drive lined with restaurants and specialty stores. She noticed streaked tire treads going through the stoplight three blocks from her and followed them to the brake lights across the road into her favorite coffee shop with the $2.10 frappuchinos. Someone had not stopped in time to make the light and had smashed into through the front of the structure. They could be hurt.

Sailing down along Decatur, her left hand tossing her purse and clothes on to the roof of the Burger King next to her, Bridget soared down lower and lower toward the road coming up at her. Motorists stopped as the flying blonde returned to earth. The car had slammed through the table area, smashing chairs and tables. Five people had dived to the walls or jumped over the front counter, now shoved a few people into the back of the store. The three employees on duty were shaking and scared. Were they in trouble? Did they have to clean this up? They then started noticing cuts and scrapes and tried getting help from the back of the shop left unfazed. One customer staggered to his feet limping on one good leg. Confused pedestrians stopped wondering what to do and trying to help as they watched and wondered about the young beauty from the sky. Her feet reaching ground once more, Bridget hastened to the driver in the car and opened his driver's side door.

"Are you okay?" Bridget ignored the people pointing and watching her. The driver's side air bag had exploded and twenty-eight year-old Mike Kinsey staggered confusingly from the car coughing and clutching his chest. One minute, he'd been talking to his wife, the next he'd seen the red light and the coffee shop coming around his 2002 Ford Tempo. Bridget's hand briefly supported him and her eyes discovered movement in the car. Kinsey's wife, Brenda, was struggling to reach over the front car seat to the car seat in back. Her one-year-old daughter was looking around wondering what was happening.

"I've got her!" Bridget opened the back door and slipped into the car. "Just get yourself out."

"Who are you?" Brenda blinked her eyes at Bridget before concerned by-standers pulled and helped her out of the car. Figuring out the baby seat, Bridget beamed over the young girl before her staring at her with big brown eyes and unlatched her body straps. She started reaching around her when she realized she smelled something. Her eyes looked out over the front of the car to the bright yellow flames popping up over the grill. Beyond the smell of gasoline fumes, she smelled natural gas bursting from a cracked pie in the shop. It was not going to be good.

"Oh sh-"

The natural gas and flames hitting each other exploded on contact creating a huge fireball totally incinerating everything around the vehicle. People were blown off their feet, hitting the hard sidewalk and being flung into the street. A police car stopped to guide the accident from getting worse. The fire station was five blocks away. The explosion set off car alarms and cracked the walls in the neighboring antique store and bookstore also being evacuated. Coffee shop employees crawled out the back into the alleyway with black smoke wafting out over their heads. Anything at the core of the explosion would be gone. The flash fire cracked ceramic cups, raced along paper napkins and cardboard boxes and melted Styrofoam cups into nothing. One employee pulled off her smoldering apron. A bystander jumped from burning ash. A smaller series of explosions came from in the burning coffee shop as Brenda Kinsey started realizing her husband didn't have their daughter. Witnesses started wondering where their local superhero was. Could she not have survived the explosion? Was she going to start strolling out unfazed and untouched like a special effects movie?

The fire truck arrived and firemen scrambled to hook their hoses and start spraying the fire. Another police car had stopped and all traffic on the street was blocked off. Witnesses were pushed from the scene. Brenda started screaming for her daughter. Her husband tried to get to her but fell to her feet. Why was no one doing anything? Lonnie Reeves of Detroit Fire Station Eighteen waited for the signal he had water and took his place to hit the flames. He lifted his gaze to the figure in the burning former coffee shop starting to stagger out to him.

"Someone's in there!" Ambulance paramedic Ken Olin screamed out loud. The watching on-lookers started cheering to see their heroine still alive, but then the sound turned to concern and worry. She was not so invulnerable after all. Clutching a small figure wrapped up in her cape, she hobbled forward into the open smoking and charred. Her long blonde hair almost wholly gone; long strands of it still hanging in pieces from the top of her head. Her skin and body was burned and ashen. Her legs shakily trying to support her as she ambled weakly from the store. She lifted her head to Brenda held back by Olin and lifted up the child wrapped in her cape. The small child looked around completely unhurt.

The fire department started expunging the flames and the police officers watched with shock the other surprised and concerned witnesses. This girl in the costume had survived gunfire and car accidents and had risked her life to save and shield this stranger's child from harm and it had taken all of her might to do so. Taking her daughter, Brenda watched as her daughter's rescuer stepped back and collapsed to her feet into the street. There was a gasp from the crowd to see this strange woman once so powerful now a mere mortal.

"There's an ambulance over here." Officer Steve Wayne tried to help the former beauty to her feet. "Let me help…"

"No…" Bridget coughed up smoke and ash. Her lungs were on fire. Her nerves barbecued and her eyes dried husks. Her body was about to collapse. She reared herself to her feet wondering what had happened to her, wandered toward the bookstore amidst the stares and people taking her picture with their camera phones. No one would recognize her like this, and she couldn't go home like this. The concerned were whispering, the indecent and rude screamed questions of dissent while others still believed in her powers. The fire blazing behind her, she braced her body against the bookstore, looked back to the paramedics coming at her with a stretcher and lifted her head to the heavens once more.

Before the stunned rescuers, her body lifted into the air a few feet, her speed gradually improving with her height. Gritting her teeth in pain, Bridget clawed at the air trying to gain more height. Twenty feet high, she gasped for air, coughing up mucus from her lungs, and nearly fell from where she was. At fifty feet high, she screamed to the gods of heaven and stretched her clenched fist to the clouds. Her body ravaged and burned beyond recognition, she strained harder and harder to hold on to the ley lines that carried her. She could see beyond the block, leaving behind the people watching her from Schuster Drive over a hundred feet below, and then the horizon far to Lake Superior. Her body continued fighting gravity, she reached the height of air traffic and fought to get beyond that. The gasoline had poisoned her, so had the gas, which fueled the coffee shop. Reaching sub-orbital height was never so difficult before. Bridget gasped in the wet moist air of the clouds and reached pure sunlight at last.

Direct sunlight reaching her, dark violet space above her, Bridget gasped easier now. Her lungs breathed easier now, but her body was still burned and fried. Her eyes finally opened to see the melted flesh all over her body. Her voice cracked in shame to see it like this. Her looks had been ravaged; her beauty taken from her. She shed a tear feeling unattractive and fell backward unconscious.

Once her mind shut down, she started plummeting back to earth. The atmosphere started screaming and whistling around her. Friction began trying to slow her fall by heating her up. Pieces of her cindered clothing flew off her body and her body tumbled and rolled over and over. Eventually, her unconscious body righted itself up, the weight of her body falling first with her legs and arms flailing in the hasty descent. The ground started coming up fast.

Around fifteen thousand feet up, Bridget turned her head and opened her eyes partially to the sunlight off Cass Lake off to the northeast. It was only about twenty-five miles for her, but she could just barely make it… or not. Weaving through the land coming up fast was the Rouge River cutting through the land to the St. Clair Waterway. At eight hundred feet she reached out to the river and restored her power of flight. She leveled off, the wind speed breezing into her instead of against her. She reached the river edge and let go again, falling like a stone deep into the river, her body carried by the water current.

Her mind drifting to sleep once more, Bridget heard distant voices calling to her mind. Singing voices in chorus filled her senses. It was from the voices of a hundred spirits from the earth calling and urging her to carry on. Her unconscious body wafted and washed through rapids and over a flooded dam under the surface of the water. The blonde one expunged her last breath from her lungs and continued dozing off. Her mind was hallucinating. She was at Troy, her lover, Paris, slaughtered by the Argives and his blood on her dress. Beyond that, Egyptian warriors fought Hittite armies with spear and bow. Burning oil pyres illuminated the shadow of the Great Pyramid. Ancient magicks, more ancient and more mysterious, were trying to tell her something. She was on a Saxon battlefield, Viking hordes in steel helmets and horned headgear clashing en masse on horseback. The smell of blood and death was around her. Her mind was on British soil as Celtic and Gaul armies clashed with the Roman legions invading her homeland. The red-bearded and long-haired Arthur pulled Excalibur screaming at the strength of already forgotten Celtic deities ready to bring Christianity to the British Isles. The enchanted sword burst with light in her mind.

Bridget's eyes woke and her arm pierced the water surface with revenge against the injuries she had. The pain was gone, those familiar tingling and racing sensations returning to her. A quick gasp of air for her lungs, and she dived deep once again for the power of Mother Earth. Her powers were from the Earth, not beyond. Earth, air, fire, water… the voices had chanted. Poisons to the planet could harm her. The fire was caused by gasoline, made from oil, but there was natural gas there too. That might have stopped it from killing her. Hiding in the wash under the rapids, Bridget watched her scabs and burns washing off of her. Her beauty was coming back. Her long hair, now wet and saturated, was falling down around her shoulders once more. Her skin was returning pink and perfect once more. Breathing easier, Bridget hugged herself realizing she was getting stronger again. That strange force in her body was returning to her. Her fingertips tingled, her body started feeling perfect and she awoke again with the presence she could do anything. Her lungs filled with air and released it in the form of a satisfying gasp. Then she realized she was in trouble…

"Oh no…" Her mind realized the damage. The fireball had ruined her costume. One sleeve was completely gone except for the cuff. From her waist up to her neck, she had been exposed to her abdomen and chest. "Oh no… oh no…. No, no, no, no, no…" She began fretting. "Crap!!!" Her red skirt was barely staying on her. One red stocking boot hung down around her right ankle. All she had to cover her burned bra was her other sleeve, scorched and frayed by the flap of fabric still attached to the lower part of her leotard. Clenching her teeth, she began swearing a volley of incoherent syllables into a stream of nonsensical gutteral profanity.

"I guess I'm going to the mall after all..." She told herself, tying her last scraps of costume around her bust and stood to her feet before lifting off into the sky.


	13. Chapter 13

13

"See you Becca…" Becca Weller and her mother dropped off Bridget at home. She had met them at the mall while shopping. Two costume stores and a Halloween outlet and neither of them had a decent fresh Supergirl costume. Her own popularity had ruined her. There was not a decent costume left in town. They had been bought up by girls to earn money entertaining at parties and by guys for their girlfriends to wear. Despite this defeat to her alter ego, she had eight new tops, two new pairs of jeans and a new pair of shoes. As she entered her house carrying her shopping bags, she quickly realized she'd been on the news again. Her mother jumped out of worried depression from the sofa and raced over to her, happily hugging and squeezing her.

"My daughter's alive!! She's alive!" Cate screamed ecstatically overjoyed. "My first born child is still alive!" She held her sister's face. "And not a mark on her! I knew you weren't that girl!"

"What's going on around here?" Bridget looked to her father at the desk. Kerry and Rory had swarmed around her as well. They sniffed her clothes, picked her hair looking for ash and studied her arms and face looking for telltale scars. Kerry sniffed and inhaled every part of her sister trying to find a trace of the fire on her and Bridget responded in kind by sniffing and inhaling her back.

"What do we do next?" She asked her sister. "Go lift our legs on a fire hydrant?"

Kerry just gritted her teeth disgustedly and stormed the upstairs. She almost had her!

"I am making you your favorite dinner for not being that girl." Cate clanked the pots and pans together happily. "Baked fish, vegetable salad and macaroni cheese!"

"But, mom, my…" Bridget couldn't break her joy by correcting her. She looked over to her father working on his column. "Daddy?"

"Beej…" Paul composed himself a bit and stood to approach her. "That girl from the news… She gave her life to save a kid. Everyone thinks she… flew off to die from her burns."

"I taped it!" Rory looked up. "Let's watch the footage again!"

"Rory!!!" Paul screamed at the boy.

Bridget looked at her mother happily cooking with a big grin and singing to herself. Her father seemed to have made his peace with the moment and Kerry seemed to still be in denial. Rory was just waiting to see what happened next. Bridget tried to think how to treat this without tipping them off.

"Daddy, I got like the coolest tops!" She regressed back into her former personality. "Like my new thongs?"

"They're dental floss." Paul corrected her. "Honey, do you understand what has happened here?"

Cate was happily singing a new note in the kitchen as they looked at her in denial.

"Entirely!" Bridget shined free of worry. "Finally I can get back to my life without Kerry trying to draw blood from me or something. I was starting to worry about her."

"I'm still wondering about how you got that free college tuition." Rory still schemed a bit unsure about his sister. Paul swatted at his son withthe couch pillow for mentioning it. Cate happily sung over the kitchen stove to having a daughter who was normal.

"All I know is…" Paul kissed his daughter. "Our lives are going back to normal."

"Or what passes for it." Rory cracked and smarted off again only to get swatted again. Bridget meanwhile paused and lifted up the newspaper from the sofa. Pulling her long hair back, she noticed the article about the New York City detective looking for her help. Her lips slightly parted as she took a deep breath. Her mother was happy, and yet, Kerry was still indubitably frustrated. What would they do if Supergirl showed up again? This dead heroine was going to have to prove she was still very much alive, but first, she had to get her costume back. The first one had been found by chance on that discount rank at Galaxy Cards and Collectibles. When it was burned from the apartment fire, she made the second from the skirt of an old cheerleader uniform, Rory's childhood Superman costume from Halloween 1989 and a red sheet buried in the back of the closet. She was going to have to return to the Galaxy store and start scavenging again for a third. This time, she was going to have to pay seriously for it.

Fortunately, she'd been squirreling away a lot of money once spent on clothing in another bank on the other side of Detroit. Investing in the stock market had increased upon it as well. After her powers had kicked it, she had started making unconscious perceptions in the stock market that proved to be accurate. After watching stocks escalate, she started investing in them and making back her both her investment and more. She wanted to tell her parents she had made twenty thousand dollars so far, but then she'd have to explain why and how she had predicted to make those investments and how to make them work. Taking the bus to the Bank of America to avoid flying in her normal clothes, she took out the cash she expected to pay to replace her costume. A check or credit card could be traced back to her and then she'd have a lot of awkward questions to answer. After the bank, it was back to Galaxy and invading the racks of costumes for another Supergirl costume, or at least a Superman in her size she could alter to what she wanted. The store was in a former warehouse. It was the largest comics and collectibles store in Detroit and was decorated in everything, Sci-fi, Horror and Fantasy from literature, the motion pictures and media. Autographed pictures pf celebrities, such as Lou Ferrigno, Carrie Fisher, David Selby, Helen Slater and David McCallum, actors who had appeared here at one time or another, stared down from the walls. Surrounded by shelves of action figures and sci-fi toys, endless tables of comic books and a universe of once popular culture and merchandise, Bridget spanned and looked over several costumes. Several of them were stereotypical fake characters for amusement; others were crass and crude fake costumes with the wrong details or added icons. Why would the Hulk run around with a picture of himself on his chest? Why would the Spiderman costume have the Marvel Comics logo embossed in the middle?

"Excuse me?" Bridget had disguised herself with a wig of red hair and dark sunglasses to hide her true appearance and identity from the public. She looked up to Jason Howlett, a working high school student from this side of town who read horror novels and free comics behind the counter between selling comic books to his friends. "Do you have any Supergirl costumes?"

"No…" Howlett munched on pizza between customers. "I technically rented them out at first, but after you-know-who showed up, I sold all the ones had left to catering services and party shops to blondes for private parties. I only order new costumes as they get sold, and my last one was sold just last week."

"When do you get another one?"

"Next month."

"Can you specially order one for me and hold it?" Bridget asked.

"Yeah, sure…" Howlett reached under his register and pulled out his order pad and catalog. "It will take six to eight weeks. Will this be credit or debit?"

"Crap!" Bridget cursed. Six to eight weeks was a long time, and something serious could happen in that time. "Where can I find another costume retailer?" Her disgusted exasperation reached the ears of William Simpson in the office behind the counter. His employee was doing okay, but this red-haired lady really wanted a copy of that costume. He had listened to her searching and skirting through the costume racks five to six times looking exactly for what she wanted.

"There's the Sci-Fi Emporium at the mall… but they're kind of limited in what they stock." Howett started thinking through his memories of the area. "There's Masquerade over in Dearborn… A lot of places just don't sell superhero costumes all year round. You can try the Party Store in Warren."

"Where is the next major costume retailer around here?" Bridget was getting desperate.

"Chicago."

"Double crap!!" Bridget screeched frustratedly and grabbed up her purse with a stress-filled jerk. Her own legend was ruining her! Stepping back to avoid a pack of eleven-year-old boys buying up old comics, she clenched her teeth exasperatingly irritated. Trying to control her temper, she stomped out of the store with a determined mission to restore an identity to which she had become addicted. Behind her, Simpson opened an adjacent register to help check out the boys behind the disgruntled departing .

"Don't worry, Jason…" Simpson looked over his cashier. "You did okay. Sometimes we just can't help every customer."

"She really wanted a Supergirl costume." Jason was ringing up a stack of comic books for one of the kids. "It was almost as if it was a matter of life and death." Reacting with a thought, Simpson paused from typing in prices on his register to remember something.

"I just had a thought…" He talked out loud. "What if that was… I mean, maybe she was actually…"

He and Jason had the same thought.

"I think she was wearing a wig." Jason remarked by chance. He and his employer forgotten their adolescent customers for a second and looked out the front of their place for a trace of the frustrated blonde in the red wig.

"Oh my god! She was in my shop!!!" His imagination went off the scale. "If I had known, I'd have picked it up specially for her!!!" Their voiced excelled in pitch with their brush with celebrity.

Her temper abating, Bridget pulled off her wig and glasses once she was a block from the store and walked the length to the bus stop. Stuffing her accoutrements into her large purse, she stopped at the crosswalk and waited to cross with a group of people mulling around her. Coming up behind Bridget to wait to cross, Tricia Haltom and her daughter, Chloe, emerged alongside the distracted and stood next to her. Holding on to her mother's hand, trussed up in her pink winter coat and white stocking cap, cute and precocious Chloe looked over the Bridget and immediately recognized her. Bridget was the one who had pulled her from the front of the bus last month! Her eyes lit up, her little face beamed excitedly and she looked back to her mother.

"Mommie! Mommie!" The yanked on her mother's coat. "It's her! It's her!!"

"Honey…" Vaguely Marilyn Monroe-like in appearance, Tricia gently chided her only child. "We don't bother strangers." Bridget finally looked over to and noticed her. "She thinks you're someone else."

"I get it all the time." The light changed and Bridget hastened across the street and turned to head up along Plaza Drive. Reaching down, Tricia plucked her daughter up off her feet to ride on her hip.

"But mommie…" Chloe continued talking. "I want her at my birthday party!"

"Honey, we don't invite strangers…."

At the Bodies By U Aerobics Studio, Bridget strided inside recognized by a few of her friends. Russell McDonald and Jimmy Pratt grinned and wooed at her beauty. Lee Ferguson and a group of girls called and pulled Bridget over to share a few seconds. Despite what school or grade level, almost everyone loved Bridget and cared about her. Why was she not at the mall as often? Where was she keeping herself? Had she been grounded again? What had she done this time? Listening to a few new rumors and whispered stories, Bridget hugged a few close friends and platonically kissed a few closer friends. Only seventeen and she had already outgrown her high school peers and materialistic boundaries of empty and useless status quos, the one strolled through the studio to the lady's locker room and signed for a locker in her name. Subliminally estimating what she needed, she tucked the wad of bills she had into the pocket of her blue jeans and removed her jacket to hang in the locker. She primped her image in the mirror for a second before closing and locking the locker. Another friend from school passed by her as Bridget parted from the locker room. She turned to the direction of the exercise room, but instead of entering it, she departed out the side entrance into the garden area adjacent the Sushi restaurant next door. Observing a few faces, she continued mulling through her route as if she were just wandering around and stepped toward the back of the studio which she counted on being empty and unattended. Once out of sight, her pace picked up and her feet left the ground, her body once again lifted up by the ethereal ley lines of the planet and her hand before her to guide her path along her route. Detroit and the earth itself once more skewered beneath her to miniscule size as she ascended once more to godly heights. She had no cape flapping behind her this time; it was just her and her form-fitting dark blue sweater and blue jeans. Without a costume to distract witnesses, anyone could see she was just an ordinary girl and would want to know her name. The costume was more than just an identity for her; it was a distraction from her life as a mere blonde. At sub-orbital level above the planet, Bridget's azure blue eyes gazed beyond the landscape and analyzed the topography of her planet. She recognized the shape of Lake Michigan, realized the location of the city to the north and then dived to earth grabbing on to gravity to pull her along.

"Flight 13, you are ready to go on Runway 10." An air traffic controller at Chicago O'Hare Airport guided and aided all the traffic coming to the city. "United Airlines 85, remain in holding pattern, we have you in radar and…. What the hell is that?" An unidentified object without a radar signature streaked into controlled air space. "85, hold off, I'm getting a bogey."

FAA Officer James Luttrell leaned in to view the spectacle.

"It's coming in like a missile." Luttrell watched the blip on the screen. Activity in the tower started panicking.

"The air field swears it's not one of theirs!"

"What is it? What is it!!!"

"Get me a visual!"

"Flight 10, you're closest!" Luttrell sweated another 9-11 was occurring as he yelled through his headset. "Get me a visual! What do you see?"

"Object dodged us, passed 75 meters north-northwest out of Detroit!!!" Pilot Frank Wise and his crew rushed to see what it was. "Object in excess of 250 miles an hour. No visual!!"

"Get me a visual!"

"Detroit?" Controller Bill West had relatives living near the Motor City. "It's her!" He realized the rumors were true.

"Object vanished off the grid over the city!"

"Hi…." Bridget appeared sweetly and cheerfully twenty minutes later in L. & B. Costumers on Roosevelt Avenue. "I'm ready to check out." She draped a Supergirl costume wrapped in transparent plastic over the counter. This place wasn't as cluttered as Galaxy in Detroit. It was illuminated brightly with white walls, wide open walk areas and orderly posters on the walls. All the toys were behind the counter to deter shoplifters.

"That's a good collector's item." Thirty-six year old Cathy Troutt started to ring Bridget up. "It's from the official DC costumers line that furnishes the motion pictures." She heard her phone ring and paused to get one of her cashiers to complete the transaction. Turning round to her office at the end of the counter, she stepped into her closet-sized cubbyhole and picked up her phone.

"L. & B. Costumers…"

"This is William Simpson at Galaxy Comics in Detroit…" The voice on the phone announced. "Do you have any Supergirl costumes?"

"I got one left."

"Look, I know you ain't going to believe this…" Simpson took a deep breath. "Did you see _America's Most Wanted_ about the blonde girl in the Supergirl costume? I think she was just in my shop trying to get a costume and she could be heading up there…"

Cathy poked her head from her office. She watched the just departing the store.

"I just sold a costume to a blonde girl."

"She was there!!!" Simpson yelled to his employees. "We just missed her!!!"

"She made it up there in under twenty minutes!" Howlett checked his watch.

On Chicago's West Side, Miguel Hernandez tossed his shoplifted goods over a fence to make his escape and ran from the police officers on foot chasing him. He was six-feet and four inches tall, built like a linebacker and a former Marine as well thrown out of the service for physical assault and drug use. The police officers behind him were older and heavier but still staying on his tail even as he vaulted and climbed over fences, raced through backyards and through store alleys. Police sirens were shrieking through the block and every time he saw those flashing red and blue lights, he barreled back the way he came. Officer Joe Mitchell once got him but had his face caved in for the attempt. Another officer tried to mace him, but it just made the Hispanic American even more vicious. The Chicago police took it personally when their own was attacked. Racing through the intersection avoiding cars, Hernandez reached an SUV stopped at the light, pulled open the driver's side door and threw the mother of three from her vehicle to the asphalt to take her vehicle. She fought a second for her kids in the back seat and received a blow to the head for her effort. Hernandez slammed her door on her and pressed his foot to the gas pedal. The car started lurching for a second then stopped, it's back wheels screaming against the asphalt but not moving.

Bridget stood at the tail end of the car just barely out of sight. Clad in her red, blue and yellow once more, her street clothes in a backpack under her cape, her feet entrenched against the ground and her fingers curled around the bottom frame of the car, she heard the wheels screaming, smelled the exhaust billowing next to her and gritted her teeth holding on to the SUV. No one, but no one hit a mother of three and got away with it while she was around. Two officers raced around her barely paying attention to her and pulled Hernandez from the car screaming and cursing. More officers raced on to the scene to help their colleagues pin the felon to the ground and cuff him. A second more, they and the citizens by the lake arched their heads up to the blonde beauty rushing up to the sky.


	14. Chapter 14

"Good morning, Chicago!" Local morning personality Shelly Jamison-Daniels shined and greeted her viewers from TV station KDCN. "Wanna guess which mysterious Detroit apparition appeared just yesterday in our city? For the last two months, Detroit has been a buzz with stories about a young lady in a Supergirl costume saving people and punishing the evil in their grand city, but yesterday, she seemed to pay us a visit. Twenty-one sightings in our city alone within two hours as the Kryptonian cutie caught shoplifters, saved people in near accidents and even stopped to say hello to the kids at Montgomery Doss Elementary School before rushing off again." Shelly grinned excitedly. "Supergirl, if you're tired of Detroit, Chicago sure loves you!!!"

"Bridget, we've barely seen you." Becca Weller sat on Bridget's bed in her Detroit home. "You never go shopping anymore."

"I went shopping yesterday." Bridget told her pal.

"I meant with people…." Becca added to her statement. "Bridget, look, my dad is taking me on an early skiing trip up to Canada. That's like a whole other country. I would really like it if you came with us. Don't make me go skiing with my brothers and sisters."

"Becca," Bridget sorted and matched her outfits. "I don't know. I've got a lot of stuff going on in my life now."

"Oh, you got to be kidding me." Kerry entered the room half-heartedly eavesdropping to get her book. Bridget looked back at her then back to Becca.

"I'd have to get my parents to say it was okay." Bridget turned to her classmate. "I can't exactly sneak out."

"I can't believe I heard that." Kerry mumbled out loud. Bridget had made sneaking out a form of art… at least the old Bridget had.

"What's wrong with your sister?"

"She just discovered she's adopted." Bridget claimed. Kerry made a face of disgusted annoyance and Becca dropped her jaw believing it. Unwilling to listen to this colliding of blonde thoughts, she departed from them into her bathroom if but to separate herself from them.

"I knew you two weren't really related." Becca absorbed the ungrounded accusation. "So what about it, Bridge? Do you wanna go?"

"Yeah," Bridget thought it over. "And, you know, I think we ought to separate when we get up there so we don't cramp each others style. That way, we can meet twice as much boys without getting in each other's way."

"Oh my god, Bridge, that's like so genius." Becca beamed liking the idea a lot. "You're like a scientist or something!"

"Oh, god," The blonde one realized Becca was almost a window into the person she once was. "Did I once really sound like that?" She asked herself then looked back to her friend. "I'll call you tonight and let you know if I can go."

"This trip is like so happening!" Becca perceived Bridget as already having permission and excitedly hugged her with thoughts of their itinerary already in her mind. A giddy laugh, a tight bond of friendship and Becca was off down the back stairwell of the Hennessy house ready to give the news to her parents that there would be six for the trip to Canada instead of five. A cursory good-bye to Bridget's father later, and Becca was off for home. Paul watched the scatter-brained young lady vanish out the back door and head for home then glanced to his daughter.

"Daddy…"

"What…." Paul's voice screeched prepared for the worst.

"Becca's family is taking an early Christmas skiing trip up to their cabin up in Canada this weekend and invited me along. Can I go?" She really wanted this trip to cover up her excursion to New York to meet the police captain.

"What about school?" Paul heated up dinner.

"It's a five day weekend." Bridget answered. "Some teacher meeting thing and I'd be back Monday morning ready for school."

Rory looked up from the living room floor and his video game on the TV.

"But Bridget, who's going to protect the city while you're gone?" He mumbled stagnantly with a look of confusion. "They never did catch Doctor Doom." Paul threw a dishtowel at him to shut up.

"I don't know, Beej…" Paul loved to keep his daughters close. Even with her seemingly reformed, he wasn't sure about losing Bridget into the snowy wilderness of another country. "I'd have to check something like that with your mother."

Practically announced, Cate arrived home at that second wearing her jacket over her hospital scrubs. Dropping her purse into the chair by the door, she looked to her family across from her and announced the obvious with a certain air and attitude of annoyance and personal aggravation.

"She's back!!!" She announced.

"Who?" Paul asked. Bridget grew quiet. Cate stopped halfway cross the room and posed with her fists entrenched to her hips.

"Super Bridget?!" Rory guessed. Bridget looked away expecting an explosion.

"Rory, toss me the dish towel." Paul called for the towel as his son sent it back to him. Upon touching it, Paul reared it back and flung it at him again for the dumb crack.

"That's impossible!" Bridget responded with the obvious. "She's in Chicago now."

"Is she?" Cate strolled over plucking the folded newspaper from her purse to a certain article. "Mystery Blonde Saves Youth From Drowning." She read the article. "Twelve-year old Cody Paterson, a student from George Dewitt Elementary, was fishing with his father off the Oakwood Bridge when he slipped and fell off the bridge into the turbulent waters of the creek yesterday…" She didn't notice Bridget looking away and brushing her hair back. "The waters under the bridge were five feet deep and too much for the youth to handle as Jim Paterson dived in to save his son. Bystanders rushed to help but young Cody was nowhere to be found until twenty minutes later he came running up the street. He reported he been plucked from the waters down river by a flying young lady in a red cape and Superman shirt." She broke from reading. "Oh, look! There's a photo too!" Rory dashed to the kitchen counter to see the picture put down to his sister and father. It was a black and white photo heavily distorted by the newspaper printing process. The face of the girl in the superhero costume was indiscernible from the distance the photo was taken, but the shape of her body and the poise of her stature were obvious. Paul and Cate looked to their eldest daughter.

"She looks like Reese Witherspoon." Bridget voiced without looking up.

"Not only that…" Cate stood up straight pulling her jacket off her body. "But today in the hospital, I helped the police by treating one drug-pusher, three shop-lifters, one and two carjackers of broken bones to their bodies along with severe cases of underwear burn, as if someone had tried pulling the back of their underwear up over their heads, and they all reported that they had been attacked while breaking the law by the exact same young lady wearing the exact same costume!" Cate stared at Bridget as she was trying her in a court of law. Paul drew silent trying to think. Rory just watched the events unfold.

"She's got this thing with underwear, doesn't she?" The one answered.

"Bridget," Cate took her daughter lovingly into her arms, hugged her and then held her at length to look into her eyes. "Please, please… Is there anything you want to tell me?"

"Can I go skiing with Becca Weller up in Canada?"

Cate didn't say a thing but inside her head she was screaming at the top of her lungs.

"You flying up there in a cape or a plane?" Rory quipped. Without a dishtowel, Paul swatted him with the oven mitt.

"Fine…" Cate stifled her scream. "Go ahead…" Bridget squealed excitedly and pranced happily for the back staircase. Cate began going through frustrated annoyance as well as fearful stress to her sanity. She knew that was her Bridget. She knew it, but how to prove it. How to bust her? The need to know was killing her. She just had to know if it was her daughter or if there was another blonde young lady out there that looked just like her. She just had to know if she should feel relieved or proud of a daughter saving the world.

"Cate, you just breathe it off…." Paul pulled her close and placed her heartbeat close to his. "Just breathe it off." He kissed her neck and changed the subject. "What's with the money in the tin hidden above the refrigerator?"

"What money?" Cate pushed free from him.

"This…" He reached up above the cabinet above the refrigerator and opened the cabinet there. Filled with designer cups and old dusty movie glasses, he pulled down an old tea container made of golden tin and opened it up to reveal it was full of money. Mostly fives and ones with several twenties and a random fifty-dollar bill, it looked like a major haul.

"How much..." Rory started asking.

"Six hundred and eighty seven dollars…" Paul had already counted it.

"I haven't squirreled money away in there in years." Cate pulled a fifty out. Rory slapped Rory's hands of a twenty.

"Could you have forgotten that this was up there all these years?" Paul rationalized things rather than think the worst.

"No…" Cate forgot about Bridget for the moment. "I distinctly remember using the last of it to pay for the water heater when it broke down."

"Mom, did you hide any more money in the house?" Rory asked.

"I think I once put a can up the fireplace."

Rory dashed over and launched himself into the fireplace pulling out the screen and fake wood used as decoration and started feeling around for secret booty in his house. It hadn't been used since he was a kid. His father just hated cleaning it so they had stopped using it. His fingers danced and glided around every niche that he could reach for another tin or anything that could store money.

"Hey, Santa Claus!!!" Paul yelled at his opportunistic son. "Get out of the fireplace before you damage the flue!"

"Too late!"

"Could someone else be hiding it up there?" Cate asked her husband.

"Who?" Paul scoffed at the idea over his strained noodles. "The one who maxs out our credit cards or the one who donates large sums of our money to charity?"

"How about the one who _**used**_ to maxs out our credit cards?" Cate revealed she had a brain too. "The same person who has mysteriously stopped asking for an allowance? When was the last time Bridget asked us for money?"

"Bridget asked for money just the other…." He started thinking back. "What a second… It has been a while hasn't it."

"Mom…" Rory stuck his head between them. "Did you ever hide money anywhere else in the house?"

"Once in the attic…" Cate mumbled without thinking as her son raced upstairs to the door for the attic. "Paul, we have got to figure out what has happened to our daughter. This…" She picked up and held up the newspaper briefly. "… is one thing. If she is hiding money in the house, where is she getting it?"

"God…" Paul stopped what he was doing and leaned against the counter. "Throw a bald guy and a fat guy in here and we'd be an episode of _Lost_!"

"Hey!" On the second floor, Bridget had dragged down a suitcase and travel case from the attic, but Rory grabbed the drawstring for the hatch from her and pulled it down in his mad run for free money. Watching the seat of his jeans dashing up into the rafters, she paused, stepped back and pulled a long lock of her hair behind her left ear as sounds reached her mind. Someone in the neighborhood was making daiquiris, someone else was trying to figure out their new TIVO and her own parents were whispering about the cash she had planted for them to find to help pay the bills. Instead of freely accepting it, they were somehow linking it back to her. She didn't worry about it. It would all play out to its inevitable logical conclusion in the end. She carried the suitcases into the room. Flipping the big one on to her bed, she popped it open and looked upon the quilt stored securely within it.

"I'm going skiing… Skiing…" She sung under breath to herself. Kerry looked up reading from her bed. She looked at Bridget with the luggage pulling out her winter clothes.

"Moving into your Fortress of Solitude?"

"My what?"

"Spiders!!!" Rory screamed in the attic over their heads. "Get them off me!!!"

"Bridget… please…" Kerry rose up and implored to their sisterly bond. "You've got to tell me. I can keep your secret. I can help cover you against mom and dad. You just can't shut me out like this. I'm your sister."

"Kerry…" Bridget dropped her jaw and looked into Kerry's eyes. "I wish I could tell you, but… she's not me."

"I still don't believe you." Kerry lowered her head defeatedly and turned away disillusioned. Her sister was no longer taking her into her confidence. Whatever bond they had seemed to be over. The auburn-haired middle child descended down the back stairs to the kitchen. Her mind filled with guilt and regret, Bridget realized for the first time that she might be pushing her sister away. She didn't want to do that. She pressed her bedroom door shut and started considering possibilities and alternate options. Her back to the door, she took a few steps into the middle of the room and seemingly rehearsed to the mute and speechless door.

"Kerry…" She whispered to her own ears. "It's me. I'm Supergirl." Her voice was delicate and breathless. "You were right. I can fly and lift cars and do all sorts of things - incredible things I'm still discovering. My mind and soul have been changed. I can see things I never saw before." Her voice drew silent, her breath slowed. Tears rolling down her face. "You were right all along. I wanted to tell you from the start, and I wanted you to bust me, but… You see," She paused taking a deep breath, another tear sliding down the left of her face. "I'm not allowed to tell."


	15. Chapter 15

At the light of dawn, Matt Weller picked up Bridget to go with his family up to the Moosehead Lodge near Moosehead Lake thirty miles north of Toronto. Still clad in her robe, Cate waved her daughter goodbye after words of maternal guidance. Two sons, two daughters and his daughter's friend with him, successful lawyer and entrepreneur Mathew Weller drove to the private airstrip he owned with two colleagues and flew his small Cessna across the bay and landed with an uneventful arrival. The plane ride had been five hours, the shuttle trip into the high elevations. Becca's younger brothers were annoying, but she and Bridget had talked about their world with each other as Lisa Weller played hostess and mediator between feuding sons and her tired baby . Moosehead Lodge was up in the higher elevations where the sky was bright and clean. The land was virginal, untouched by the devices of mankind. Rocky landscapes dotted with woods and open rolling pasture nearly covered all year round by ice, snow and frozen water of varying degree. On arrival, Becca's father made a crack about Bigfoot sightings and the embarrassed daughter rolled her eyes. Bridget's breath steamed up in the mountain hideaway. It really was much more quiet up here. Less sounds coming to her senses, less to diffuse up here. Returning home to the multitude would be a shock.

Dinner was eight o'clock and the family was feeling the strains of the effort of arrival. Their three-bedroom cabin was fifty yards from the main lodge and already prepared on an opposing slope. Skis rented and wardrobe prepared, Becca was ready to sleep, but Bridget was still inexplicably active. A brief excuse and she claimed to be ready for bed. Or not. At ten o'clock that night, a figure secreted from the cabin and ascended back to the heavens.

Bridget liked the idea of hitting New York City. In the comic books, it was supposed to teem with superheroes and people needing help so she was sure she'd fit in there. It was the Big Apple, the city that never slept, the greatest city on Earth where one could find anything or do anything and there was a lot of people there who tried doing what they wanted regardless of the law or the rules of human civilization. Groups of kids roamed the street looking for fun, confusing a life of crime for simple mischief. High school dropouts blaming society for their own mistakes robbed gas stations to fuel disgusting poisonous habits to bring themselves to the brink of suicide. Young s who once had futures became disposal humans to flout their flagging looks for and then to carelessly and effortlessly take lives without thinking twice. This was the underworld of the city that the wealthy and middle class tried to deny and ignore, but it kept coming back, blaming society for its continuing mistakes. Elliot Johnson sniffed and brushed his nose of the powder his body was trying to reject. He tossed aside the tools of his fix and stood up in the alley he lived in because of his parents. Just because he had robbed from them and disrespected them didn't give them any cause to throw him out of the house and move away for elsewhere. It was their fault for what he turned himself into today. He snorted his nose and wiped the blood from it as he looked out on to the busy Brooklyn street then noticed the young woman coming toward him and grabbed her off the street to assist in his personal degradation. A knife to her throat, if he was going to be disposable, she was going to feel it as well. He dragged her backward into the alley, her voice screaming, her legs kicking and screaming, and pounded her head into the trunk of his car. That made her dizzy enough to stop screaming and he shoved her into the decrepit car barely conscious and slammed the lid on her. It was just business to him. He dashed into the driver's seat, slammed his door shut and hit the gas pedal at his foot.

The rusted and junked 1989 Monte Carlo wasn't moving. The engine was running, the wheels were spinning, but he wasn't heading down the alley. Curling his lip disgustedly trying to form a thought, his eyes caught the reflection of a red "S" on yellow in his rear view mirror. It had to be the heroin; it had to be a bad batch. Was there such a thing as a good batch?

Bridget held up the back of the car with one hand, her right hand ripping the trunk lid off and letting eighteen-year-old Denise Bobbitt race home in terror and grateful to be alive. When Elliot tried to run, Bridget turned the car over him. The would-be serial killer stepped out of his car and watched it coming back over him like a giant cup pinning a fly to the ground. The Detroit beauty had no patience for these creeps and she showed it by pounding his vehicle hard enough that it would take him hours to get out from under it.

"Give me the money!!!" Brothers Scott and Walt Snedeker had everything handed to them. They had been good students, they rode into college on football scholarships and they had a lot of friends, but their parents never knew about their hobby of attacking and robbing Jewish delis and Catholic bookstores spouting Anti-Semitic hatred or painting Nazi swastikas on health clinics. Walt shot out a camera and his brother pounded the elderly Auschwitz survivor with his own baseball bat. They forgot the law that for every force there was a greater and equal reaction. Scott bolted for his van first pulling off his ski mask and looked back to see his brother racing out to meet him, but then a red blur whisked him off the sidewalk. He blinked once, heard his brother screaming from over his head and looked up to see him hanging by the band in his underwear from the stoplight. The van started turning over next as Walt and his two hesitant accomplices found themselves turned over and trapped inside the wrecked van, its doors mysteriously welded shut.

"Young man…" Several blocks over, the creator of Spiderman flagged down a hot dog vendor down on Broadway. "One with the works." Stan Lee reached into his pocket for some money.

"This is on me, sir!" Ralph Herold grinned excitedly to meet the famous comics creator. This hot dog was going to be his best. "You know, if you got a moment, I've got a character I'd like to tell you about. It's about this guy…." The paper wrappers on his cart flew up around him in a mess. The umbrella caught a powerful breeze and they looked up to see the blonde one soaring down toward Times Square, her cape flapping behind her and her hair wafting in the breeze.

"Did you see that? Did you see that?"

"If Spiderman goes by next, I'm getting his autograph!!!"

Down off Lexington, police cars were pursuing Craig Lionel Jardigan for beating up his wife. She had issued a restraining order on him seven months ago and had revealed he'd been molesting their daughter and her friends. Police now had the evidence they needed to put him away for a very long time. If their suspect's tan Citation made it across the New Jersey Turnpike into the next state, they could lose him. The State Police were closing in as well from a few blocks behind, but someone else was even faster. When the police reached Jardigan, they found his car flipped over in the intersection, and a hundred witnesses all describing the same blonde presence who had hung him up to dry by the Fruit of the Looms.

"Hey, Sam…" Over in the theater district, Tobey McGuire had been starring in a Broadway play of "_Romeo and Juliet_." Pulling his jacket on, he talked on his cell phone and looked and waved for a taxi cab. "Yeah, I read the script for Spiderman Four. Who are you getting for Electro?…. Tim Allen? That sounds cool. Only thing is, I don't know if I want to do it yet. No, it's not a scheduling or money thing, it's just… I don't know. I can't make up my mind. I guess I'm looking for a sign or…" He looked up and over and saw a beautiful blonde girl in costume dropping down to earth. She had long hair, a red cape and the symbol of her Kryptonian cousin flashed across her chest. She carried a young of fourteen to the steps of her apartment house as cars stopped and people turned to watch the spectacle. Watching the incident, McGuire's jaw dropped and he fell in love with the incredible flying beauty. Passing overhead, Bridget blew the handsome young actor a kiss.

"Tobey? Tobey, are you there?" Sam Raimi called through the cell phone.

"Sam," Tobey responded with an infatuated look on his face. "Get the paper work ready, I'll do it. I just had the mother of all signs…"

"She's not real!!! She's not real!!!" Ted Watterson and his in-laws had been operating an illegal and highly dangerous PCP and marijuana garden in a deserted and condemned church basement near the Twenty-Third Precinct for over eight years. It had made him wealthy several times over, enough to buy and collect an army's worth of illegal weapons, but nothing was stopping this blonde young lady. Bullets, shells, armor-piercing rounds, anti-tank grenades – nothing stopped this in the superhero costume. She had incinerated his illegal garden, flooded his lab and blown up his escape route through the old tunnels to the subway and was still coming. His wife's brother was floating trapped in the basement. His cousin had been hung up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Their best friend was never going to sound normal after having his underwear pulled over his head. Refusing to go to jail for years of illegal activities, the last five men of this illicit organization refused to accept their indubitable fates for their activities. It sounded like a war zone in this church basement and the girl just kept coming!

"Why can't we kill her?!!!"

Bridget noticed a support column and punched it out. There were several brief screams before the upstairs floor collapsed bringing down the altar and a few pews, and then brief groans and moans. Outside the church up on the street, the police had arrived and were racing inside.

"Idiots…" Bridget referred to Watterson and his employees.

"Sergeant," Captain Ed O'Neil closed his office and moved through booking to the front admission desk of the Thirty-Fourth Precinct. "If my wife calls, tell her I'm on my way home."

"Cap…" Sgt. Mike Finnerty looked to his superior. "You can't go. She's here!"

"Who?"

"Her!!!" Finnerty picked up the Detroit newspaper describing the sightings in the Motor City. "Everyone all over the city is getting calls about her. Everything's going nuts! Twenty-seven…" The phone rang again. "Twenty-eight here alone." He produced the unsolved case file from the Captain's desk. "Go get her!!!"

It took a moment for O'Neil to realize this was on the level. He flung his coat off, grabbed the file and raced up the staircase for the roof. His peers who had once so good-naturedly ribbed him for believing in the female powerhouse now believed him. The station had been buzzing with incredible phone calls of the all over the city. Squad cars were stretched thin as traffic slowed around rescue teams moving flipped over cars and pulling down felons and drug-pushers off light poles. A mugger was hanging from the radio tower on the next block. Sightings were coming in from people on the forty-eight floor of the Empire State Building. State police were starting believe it was an epidemic of schizophrenic hallucinations. How could so many seeming rational people claim to see sightings of a flying in a red cape?

"Everyone back to work!" Captain O'Neil cleared the roof of on-lookers and curiosity seekers. "We're not scaring her off. I'm meeting her alone!" There was a collective gasp of disappointment.

"Cap," Meter maid Marcy Bundy held up her pad. "Get her autograph for me?"

"What is this? A Hannah Montana concert?" He took the pad from her. "Down the steps!" He waited for the last off-duty assistant to leave his sight and slammed shut the door to the roof. Lifting up a wood two-by-four he wedged it against the door to keep from being disturbed. His breath freezing on the lofty roof over the streets, he clenched his unsolved murder case in his left hand and turned to look over the edge of the building. Seven flights up, he wondered what was going to happen next. He shuddered from the cold entering his bones and looked over the side and up to the sky. Police sirens and fire engines were busy tonight. Where was she?

"Sorry, I'm late, Captain." A voice came behind him and strolled around the searchlight on the roof. An attractive young lady with long hair strolled down from the helicopter pad and slammed down a broken Uzi. "Illegal chop shop with illegal weapons three blocks from here. They won't be going anywhere for a few hours." She folded her arms before her chest emblazoned with the large red "S" on her chest. Bridget leaned her weight to her left leg and tilted her head back. She was younger than he expected.

"You look like my daughter, Kellie." O'Neil gasped at her. "You can't be what? Fifteen?" He paused. "Is this a joke? Scott over at the Twenty-third put you up to this, right?"

"I'm seventeen." Bridget admitted freely. "But my spirit is at least four thousand years old." She raised her eyebrows intriguingly.

"Who… what are you?" The police captain asked the question everyone wanted to know. "How do you do this stuff?" Bridget looked away a second having prepared for this answer.

"I'm…." She theatrically responded. "The daughter of Thor and Aphrodite. The gods are distressed by what's happening to mortal man. You're finding new ways to destroy each other." She paused a moment, her soul laughing at her deception. "I'm not the only one." She riddled.

"This has to be a…"

"Did you want me to help you on something?"

"Yeah…" O'Neil flipped his file open to photos, notes and forensic files, the wind on the roof nearly blowing it way from his hands. "I need help catching this guy." He showed the file to this would-be young goddess and revealed to her the clues. "The year I made Captain, this guy attacked, raped and murdered seven young girls within the span of three weeks using the same M.O. within Central Park and then vanished. One psychic said he had committed three other murders not yet discovered and another psychic said he was out of the area, possibly a truck driver or traveling salesman…."

"Psychics are only as good as the information they get." Bridget answered. "They resonate on separate energy levels and wavelengths. Mortals have enormous psychic potential, but they're not capable of omniscience."

"Where is this guy?" O'Neil shivered in the cold. "Who is he?"

"He's out of the area." Bridget reacted as if she were hearing the whispers of the murdered women. "He's a drifter without family, without ties… He changed his M.O. That's why he hasn't been caught. He's dealt with police before, but…. Not here."

"Who is he?"

"My psychic visions aren't that far yet." Bridget answered with decisive authority and closed the file. "I need to return to Nashville and talk to my Aunt Athena." She was playing the role meant for an actress. "She stays close to the Parthenon there, but she's not crazy about Country Music. She keeps up with crimes around the world for Uncle Herc."

"Please tell me you're kidding with this mythology stuff." O'Neil looked into her godly features. "Oh, one of the girls here wants your…" He reached for Bundy's pad and looked back to empty space. He had turned away from her in less than a second. The young lady in the cape and short skirt was gone! How did she vanish so fast? He arched his head back and saw a flitting red glimpse shoot round and over the direction of the Empire State building toward the East River. In the pad, O'Neil read in large red letters, "To Marcy, S."

The sound of Manhattan resonating around him as echoes and vibrations, Captain Ed O'Neil collected the pad and case file in his left hand and kicked the wood block away from the door. Behind the door, the descending stairwell was full of cigarette smoke from waiting detectives and eavesdropping female officers.

"You heard her…" He started down. "Illegal chop shop over on Broadway. Let's go pick up those chowder-heads." He flipped Marcy's pad over his shoulder into her hands.


	16. Chapter 16

There was plenty of hot water this morning in the Hennessey house. Paul dragged himself from bed a little before six and took his medicine. His heart surgery was a month away. His prescribed diet and health regimen was driving him nuts. No pizza, no chips, no soft drinks, no flavor, no nothing… He and Cate were hiding his health woes from the kids, or at least from two of them. Whether Bridget knew the truth already was open for way too much speculation he wanted to stay out of for right now. Clad in his robe and slippers, he strolled down the walkway pretending not to see Fred O'Doyle across the street and looked for his column on the second page of the Detroit Tribune. Along the way, he noticed the headline in the corner of the newspaper reading "Supergirl Revealed!!"

"Cate!!!" Paul stormed into the house waving the paper.

"Hey, Kyle…" A few houses over on the next block, Sports writer Tommy Brady read the newspaper as he hovered over his cold cereal. Having replaced Paul at the Tribune, he revered in his job and lusted for the ladies there so much he was nicknamed Mr. Sexual Harassment. Hovering over him drowsy and tired, his son plunked down next to him nearly ready for school. "Your girlfriend's in the paper." Tommy referred to Kyle's obsession with the enigmatic beauty not knowing it was also a thin allusion to the girl who posed as her. Kyle grabbed the paper and read what Captain Edward O'Neil had told the world about the stunning superhuman protector.

"She's a goddess???" Kyle read the paper and leaned sideways. His eyes rolled back and he passed out.

"You were right." Tommy pulled a five-dollar bill from his pocket for his wife. "He couldn't handle it."

"Bridget, look!!!" Up in her family's skiing cabin, Becca Weller jumped on to Bridget in bed and flashed her a copy of the Detroit Tribune. "She got interviewed by this guy in New York City. That's like where Spiderman lives!" She paused a second. "And maybe Batman too!"

"What?" Bridget rolled over in her toasty warm bed and fretted with her comforter. She sat up rubbing her eyes and tossing back her long hair as she focused on the newspaper. The Associated Press had a photo of her in the air near the Statue of Liberty. Her mind was still hazy about half of what she had done. She didn't even recall returning to Canada or going to bed. Her eyes looked over the paper and skimmed over the facts reported about her. Where did some of these facts come from? She claimed being the daughter of Thor and Aphrodite, deities from separate pantheons, but where did the idea come she was born in Atlantis and watched the pyramids being built? She didn't mention that stuff!

"He should have been a writer…" She mumbled under breath.

"Bridget, think about it…" Becca sat on the bed with her best friend. "Everyone I know who has seen her claims she is like… incredibly beautiful. She's supposed be beyond beautiful…."

Bridget looked away as if she were looking at an invisible studio audience watching her life on television.

"It makes so much sense!!" Becca was fascinated by the claims.

On the nightstand of their bedroom loft, Bridget's cell phone rang. She lifted it up rubbing the crystals of sleep from her left eye and yawning. The Caller ID screen on it read simply Detroit, Michigan.

"Oh, gee…" Bridget mumbled knowingly sarcastic. "I wonder who that is." She picked it up and pressed the button inaudibly voicing words to Becca then talked to her relative on the phone. "Hi, mom…"

"How'd you know it was me?" Cate stood in her kitchen ready to leave for the hospital.

"You said you'd call me."

"Got a really good article in the newspaper here." Cate responded wickedly smug and amused then turned to read the article again. Kerry had it again and she had to wrestle it away from her. "Want me to read it to you?"

"Mom, I really don't care about anything in the newspaper." She told the truth. "Becca's mother is going to show me how to ski."

"It's a really good article." Cate voiced out loud. Kerry annoyingly grabbed the phone from her mother and pressed it to her ear reading the newspaper.

"For the last three to four months," She read the story with excited relish and a knowing grin. "The area from Chicago to Detroit to Cleveland has been getting unconfirmed and unsubstantiated accounts of a figure raging from an unknown presence to a flying young girl in a superhero costume. Last night, this unknown and enigmatic mystery increased the range of her flight plan by appearing over the Greater Manhattan area. Police are still collecting reports, but at last count, there were stories from over five hundred people all over New York City ranging from actors Tobey McGuire and Jerry Seinfeld to Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg…."

"Oh my god, Kerry…" Bridget fought with her sister through the phone. "You got me. You… Oh wait, I'm in Canada. She hasn't been seen up here."

"That's what you want me to think!"

Cate took her phone back from her daughter.

"Stop persecuting your sister!"

"Get her to confess!!!"

"She can't be that girl!"

"No, you just don't want her to be!"

Bridget listened to them fighting back and forth and quietly turned off her phone without another word. Becca had listened to just part of it and tried to understand. Sometimes she wanted a younger sister like Bridget had instead of two brothers invading her privacy, but at times like this, she wished she was just an only child.

"What's that about?" Becca asked Bridget.

"You don't want to know…."

After dropping Kerry off at the library and Rory off with his friends, Paul Hennessy was off to a covert rendezvous with a heart specialist. Expecting hope and optimistic dreams of avoiding major heat surgery, he listened to reviews of his weight and beats per second and plans for his surgery. How did this happen? He was only 50 years old. That was still young in most cultures and he didn't feel like a doddering old man. What if something went wrong? Who would take care of his wife and kids? He had spent years not worrying about this stuff and now it all was catching up to him in the form of the specter of old age reminding him his time was coming up. That was the reason he didn't tell his kids. They had enough imaginary problems and perceived tribulations to worry about it. They would learn about it soon enough, and he was not going to sour their life until he could not possibly hide it anymore.

After the doctor, Paul walked the few blocks to the Detroit Tribune. He returned to his jovial self to say hello to Mr. Ritter the custodian and share a grin to his friends. Nick Sharpe was the Editor now. A former football player turned journalist, he had acquired the job through his father's friendship with the owner of the paper… or so it was claimed. Joyce and Suzanne ran the restraunt and gossip columns and always shared with him something edible and delicious. His resulting health problems had become public knowledge here and they shared with him their new fat-free and health-free muffins. Larry Kline was the newspaper's entertainment editor; he welcomed Paul's visit with a hearty handshake and heartfelt hope telling him not to worry. Nick was nowhere to be seen yet. In the heart of the newspaper's journalistic inner sanctum, Paul stopped short and saw Bridget's picture in the awards shelf. Twelve years of rewarding students of excellence and his first-born daughter, once a young pixie with blonde pigtails and rosy cheeks, was going to a future novelist or journalist. His heart pumped with pride to the aspect of that. A few months ago, he feared she was on a narcissistic and materialistic path to nowhere. Wait, that _**was**_ a mere few months ago.

"Hennessy…" Sports Editor Tommy Brady strolled into the reporter's lounge area. "What are you doing here?"

"I work here!" Paul reminded him.

"No, I mean… really?" Tommy stared at him blank-faced then started grinning to turn the insult to a joke. "I'm just kidding, big guy…" He rapped Paul to the arm then turned to pour a cup of java. Tommy could be so annoying. Paul didn't hate him, but he felt he was the only one who really knew him. Balding, slight of frame and often condescending, Tommy had been his assistant editor back before Rory was born, but then when Cate decided to go back to work and Paul decided to work at home, Tommy moved up and Paul was moved to being a weekly columnist. Pining for a cup of coffee, Paul instead took a bottle of water from the drink machine, his eyes noticing a new newspaper article decorating the lounge. Preserved in a gold and glass frame was an article with the title, "Blonde Bombshell Buzzes City."

"How's the wife and daughter? You know, the hot one?" Tommy tilted back his coffee. He noticed Paul reading the article. "Oh yeah, her…." He sipped his drink. "She buzzes past the building about once or twice a week."

"Has anyone seen her face?" Paul asked discreetly worried.

"Who looks at her face?" Tommy answered. "I figure her to be a thirty-four, thirty-five DD…."

"Tommy!!!"

"What? What?"

"There is a reason you're known as Mr. Sexual Harassment around here."

"Don't be ridiculous… I'm anything but,…." Tommy noticed a figure pass by the door. "Hey, look, there goes Boobs from reception." Paul just started turning away shaking his head. He needed to check his health insurance with Nick if he could find him.

"Paul, Paul…" Tommy tried to excuse his carelessness once again. "Look, I'm hearing there's been a shake-up in the higher ups… The owner of the paper sold some of his shares to build his stock portfolio and we got a new investor. He's planning some wing-ding thing to invite her to the newspaper. If I can meet her, I should be able to call some shots around here."

"What kind of investor is she?"

"Who cares what kind of investor she is?" Tommy was unknowingly treading into another indiscretion. "I just hope she has huge knockers."

From the library, Kerry Hennessey stepped down off the bus and looked back a second to wave good-bye to Mr. Tripper, the bus driver. He'd been driving the Hennessy girls back and forth for years and knew almost everyone on the block. The air was damp and misty as Kerry tossed the strap of her book bag over her shoulder and briefly removed her stocking cap to shake loose the form it made in her hair. Loose leaves crunched under the heels of her books. The empty Shapiro house reared up with its empty windows and deserted ramparts. The "For Sale" signed tilted at an angle amidst the trees obscuring the reputed haunted house. Next door, O'Doyles were already starting on their Christmas decorations. Thirteen-year-old Chrissy O'Doyle and eight-year-old Mary Maureen O'Doyle waved to Kerry as she half-heartedly acknowledged their existence. Their mother was one of those types still trapped in the stereotype of the stay-at-home 50's throwback homemaker mother. Kerry just sighed and continued on past the Somers house across the street to her home. A breeze kicked up tossing the leaves around her and Kerry looked round for a car or something passing her. The sound of air rushing past her filled her perceptions and she turned round just before the tight clutch of something jerking her off her feet. Her book back was removed from her shoulder and tossed to the front porch of her house. Her feet were lifted off the ground and she was lifted up over the house, over the tips of the trees and up to an unobstructed view of the orange horizon looming over the city. Someone was holding her about the waist and as Kerry's hands grabbed for something to hold on to, she recognized Bridget holding her from around the waist and carrying her aloft.

"Oh, my god!!! Oh, my god!!!" Kerry's heart began racing. "You're going to kill me! You're going to kill me! Bridget!!!!"

"You wanted to know my secret, right?!" Bridget beamed ear to ear and voiced through the rush of winds and her hair rushing over her face. "I love it up here! I've never felt so free!" She beamed toward the sun. "It's like swimming on the winds through the air!"

"Oh, my god!!! Oh, my god!!!" Kerry looked down to the ground scared to death. She was… what, a hundred, two hundred feet into the air? She was far up enough that she could see only houses and blotches of trees laid out in geometric patterns, distant enough that she could not be seen by people and remote enough they were indistinguishable from earth. Gravity was still beckoning to her, and the only thing holding her aloft was her sister's right arm around her and the wind rushing under her.

"Bridget…" Kerry's eyes widened in shock. She was scared to death. "Please… please… I can't take…"

"Kerry, accept it!!!" Bridget grabbed her sister's arm and let her go, carrying her at arm's length. "Remember when we were little girls and wanted to fly like Peter Pan and Wendy! Just think happy thoughts!!!"

"Oh, my god… Oh, my god…" Kerry stuttered and mumbled in fear through hesitant giggles. She looked around as the sky opened clearer and clearer. The lights of the city were coming on under her. A blanketed landscape of shapes and lights and sounds were laid out beyond her. She couldn't tell where creation began and heaven ended. Her eyes were at the heights of gods and immortals. Bridget shined back at her imploring her trust. Memories of being a child rushed back to the middle child.

"This… is… impossible!" Her voiced cried out to the expanding sky.

"Nothing is impossible, Kerry…." Bridget replied nearly drowned out by the jet stream with her left arm stretched out to balance herself with her sister on her right arm. It was almost as if she meant it. "Canadian geese fly at this height. I've seen the moon in the middle of the day. I've seen more cities in a few days than most people see in a year!"

"How do you do this?!" Kerry screamed to make her voice heard. "Were you hit by radiation or…"

"Magic and science, Kerry!!!" Bridget screamed to the heavens Her cape snapping behind her. "Science and magic! They're two sides of one coin like belief and knowledge! Neither can exist without the other!"

"Oh my god…" Kerry's left arm was hurting her. All of her weight was stressed on it with Bridget pulling her along by it. "It is beautiful up here!" She gasped both chuckling in fear and stuttering in awed shock. She had to hold on to her sister with both hands. The cold air up here also chilled her legs, but the friction from the air speed dried her eyes and burned her face. Despite those discomforts, she loved it. Her sister did love her. She did trust her. Despite whatever happened between them, they had no secrets between them. Bridget was this girl, and the fact she used her immortal gifts to do what no one else could make her more proud than she ever had been in her life. She heard a chirping noise next to her.

"Oh, I gotta take this…" Bridget let go of her sister and took her cell phone off her skirt. Kerry's eyes looked to her and she tried to grab her by the waist, but she was already plummeting back to earth. Gravity quickly reclaimed her and suddenly Bridget was nowhere to be seen. Kerry's hands clawed at the empty air and her scream and the roaring air merged together into one shrieking echo filling the sky. Her eyes looked again and she was clutching the coffee table in her living room and still screaming. Her book of World Mythology had fallen underneath her body. She couldn't breath! Her heart had stopped! It hadn't happened, but it was so real! So real!!! Her mother rushed to her and pulled her tight.

"It's all right, care bear…" Cate sat on the floor and whispered into her daughter's ear and pulled her close into her body. "It's all right! It was just a dream! You just had a dream." She rocked Kerry with her body and stroked her head. "Catch your breath, honey. I'm holding you now, and I won't let go…"


	17. Chapter 17

"I'm home!!" Bridget returned home at seven o'clock in the morning clad in her winter clothes. "Skiing was like so much fun! It was like so incredible! Daddy, can we move to Canada?"

"Oh, dad, can we?!" Rory mimicked his sister and was swatted by the dishtowel again.

"No!" Paul raised his voice then remembered his heart. "We're not moving to Canada!" He paused thinking it over. "Snow, moose and round bacon?"

"Kerry, you should have come with me…" Bridget dropped her suitcases on the sofa and came up to the kitchen counter where her siblings ate their morning breakfast. "There were cute guys, deer, snow, cute guys, hot chocolate by fire… did I mention the cute guys?"

"Yes, you did." Kerry mumbled under breath and stirred her scrambled eggs. Standing by the back door, her mother sipped her morning coffee and checked the time. Paul mused at this family moment tiredly ready for the day. Bridget had obviously had a fun time away from home, but now it was time to return to reality, work and school whatever the situation may be.

"So…" Bridget sat beside her sister. "Anything happen while I was gone?"

"Your alter ego appeared at my school." Rory spoke up chewing bacon. "Cody Martin set fire to the science lab, and Mrs.Savage lost her breath screaming… It was like so cool!"

"Wait," Bridget looked at her brother and leaned across to his level with her hands on his shoulders. "How much does she look like me?"

The kitchen drew quiet. Cate stopped stirring her coffee and Paul turned round from choosing cereal. Kerry froze at what she was doing.

"I didn't get to see her." Rory confessed. "Mrs. DeWitt herded us out after the fire alarm, but Patrick Tisdale said she had really big boobs."

Bridget swatted him just for being disgusting and Kerry rolled her eyes at the distasteful comment. Any notion that Bridget was this girl was sort of diminishing. The Detroit blonde had appeared seven times in Bridget's absence; and yet, Kerry was not ready to let it go. Anyone who could get from Chicago to Detroit to New York and back certainly could be two places at once.

"Oh, kids…" Paul turned to his family. "The newspaper is having a party next month for a new investor." He poured milk to his cereal. "I want you all on your best behavior when we all meet Linda Kent."

Bridget started choking on her glass of orange juice. Her mother started patting her back to relieve her.

"Do we have to meet her?" Rory stirred around his fruit loops.

"Yes…" Paul insisted. "She's a part of the Detroit Tribune family like all of us. We all want her to feel welcome."

"Excuse me," Bridget looked up with alarm. "What's her name again?"

"Linda Kent." Cate said it. Bridget made a face. Her jaw dropped a bit and her eyes widened.

"I got to change for school." She downed the last of her juice and bolted from the table with her cell phone heading up the back stairs for her bedroom. She knew that name. Linda Kent was the alias under which she did her secret stock trading. Linda was the first name of Supergirl; Kent was the last name of the Man of Steel. What were the odds of another person in Detroit having that name? In the privacy of her bedroom, she pulled off her sweater and juggled her cell phone calling the woman who handled her stocks.

In the third floor of the Ritter Building, Jennifer Walters was one of seventeen brokers for the Bank of America in Detroit. Like most of her peers, the majority of her clients were private individuals and retirees who placed their retirement in companies to provide for their futures. Among these people, the person she knew as Linda Kent had to be psychic or something. Every stock she had denoted had gone up in worth or had lead to another prosperous shift in the market. Jennifer's colleagues figured she was the one making the decisions. A mere hundred-dollar stock had resulted in a sizable portfolio that was continuing to swell. Even with a mere percentage going into her bank account, Bridget found her psychic gifts with her new powers were giving her a new edge in the abstract financial world of big business as they did in the real world.

"Mrs. Walters…" Bridget checked the door of her bedroom to see if it was locked then struggled around with her arm to clean and freshen herself and change her clothes. "What's this news with me owning stock in the Detroit Tribune?"

"You are a very busy woman to track down." Walters snapped her fingers at her assistant for the Kent portfolio and sipped her coffee. "I've been trying to call you for weeks. Anyway, the owner of the paper, Harry Winkler, is buying up shares of Pontiac Pharmaceuticals and wanted your shares in it." She paused eating a bagel at her desk. "The amount he was offering was so crazy I went ahead and grabbed it up. I even tossed in those shares of Bluth Realty to unload them. Thanks to my business acumen and timing, Mrs. Kent, you are now worth a clear one million dollars. That's certainly okay, isn't it? I did okay, right?"

The cute and petite stockbroker did not know she was dealing with a teenage psychic with godly gifts. Her hand to her chest, Bridget started swaying a bit then slowly sat down to the foot of her bed. Did she say… one million dollars? This whole thing was escalating in ways she was not prepared for. This whole investing thing was started as a lark… it was an experiment to see if her visions were true. She only expected to make a few thousand dollars for spending money. Not only had she come to peace with her godly gifts, but also now they had made her set for life! One leg in her jeans and her toothbrush hanging from her lips, Bridget wanted to scream her shocked joy to the world, but whom could she tell? She had succeeded in shedding all notions of her dual identity by racing back and forth between skiing and Detroit, but now she was almost wealthy beyond her means and had a third identity as well! How was she going to attend this party at the paper for her father and be Linda Kent at the same time! Not even she was that fast!

"Mrs. Kent? Mrs. Kent, are you there?" Jennifer asked for her.

"I'm here…" Bridget replied in a tiny shocked squeak. "Yeah… you did okay." She heard the door of her room creak a bit as if someone was against it. There was a shape of someone against it on the other side. Standing up again, Bridget strided over and swatted it with the side of her foot as a lesson against eavesdropping. From the other side, Kerry shrieked from the impact.

"I get back in touch with you." She whispered into her phone and pressed the button to sign off, then held the phone to her ear to continue talking normally. "Jenna, please stop telling boys to call me up…" She was making up the same sort of narcissistic phone calls she used to make. "I don't care if he was cute, the last guy you fixed me up with was a jerk…" Bridget shifted back into her normal persona and unlocked her door to her eavesdropping sister. "Do you mind? Can I have some privacy?"

Kerry could barely say a thing. Bridget just slammed the door again on her. Standing in the hallway, Kerry just stood where she was for the moment, trying to think of what to do next. Her hand conditionally reached for the doorknob to see if it was still locked. When it turned, she pushed it open and strolled forward into the empty bedroom. Wondering where her sister had gone to, she gazed toward the window and saw Bridget in their adjacent bathroom out the corner of her eye. Spitting toothpaste in her mouth into the sink and rambling on about boys and shopping, Bridget came out of the bathroom pulling on her dark blue shirt and reaching for a brush with her one free hand. She finally clicked off her cell phone and sat brushing her long blonde hair in the mirror.

"So, Bridget…" Kerry slipped into a sarcastic type of mind. "Did some bald megalomaniac steal green meteorite rocks from the museum or something?" Bridget looked back at her.

"I have no idea what that means." Bridget looked back at her. Kerry started gritting and grinding her teeth with her fingers curling up into fists.

"You're killing me, Bridget!" Her voice was shaking. "I'm having nightmares because of you! I'm waking up screaming because I think you're sucking my life out or something." She confessed unfurling her fists. "Please… please… You've got to tell me. That girl with the powers… with the stupid costume… Is there anything you have to say to me?!"

Bridget just looked at her sister with the same confused face she'd been having since these sightings had started. Her jaw dropped slightly as she tried thinking. Kerry did not want to hear the same thing again. Her anxiety and stress was going off the scale. From downstairs, their mother called them to hurry up to leave for school.

"That skirt makes you fat…" Bridget said the one thing she thought her sister wanted to hear.

Her eyes glazed with hatred, her mind going into the sea of insanity, Kerry hissed through her teeth and stiffly reached to her sister, grabbing her by the shoulders and wanting to smack some common sense into her. Unaware of what was happening to her younger sister, Bridget resisted her restrained choking attempt with minimum effort and turned away from her. Turning on her right foot, she tossed her jacket over her purse and library book to head to school. Alone in her bedroom, Kerry grumbled and growled under her breath before screaming out at the top of her lungs.

"Where are you hiding that costume?!!!"

"Hey!!!" Cate stopped Bridget at the back door. "What did you do to your sister?"

"What am I doing to her?" The blonde one scoffed at that notion as if Kerry was doing it to herself. She rolled her eyes and headed out to her brother waiting in the minivan to go to school. Cate glanced from the secretive first-born daughter to her husband.

"Don't want to hear it…" Paul preferred to be blissfully ignorant in this debate. He just continued scraping the frying pan for his breakfast.


	18. Chapter 18

Thirty-four year-old Janice Dickerson was a college graduate with a degree on accounting, but she supported herself and her eight-year-old son by cleaning rooms, dumping wastebaskets and mopping floors in the Decatur Building near the center of Detroit. Some of her colleagues on the housecleaning staff exploited their positions by invading mini-bars and skipping duties to watch TV on big screen televisions in the boardrooms, but Janice prided herself on her integrity on honesty knowing she'd still be working here long after they quit or were fired. If she was truly fortunate, an opening could come up in accounts and she could show what she could really do for this company. Mopping restrooms and cleaning out trash showed her a million things she could do to save this company money. As she backed to the tall windows at the end of the hall in her regular mopping schedule, something dashed past the outside of the fifteenth floor. When she whirled round, she realized the better question was that someone had just buzzed the building. Dashing over the street over the traffic below was a familiar figure in red with flailing blonde hair streaking over the city. She had been a recurring phenomenon over the city for going on four months now, and now she had joined the club of people who could say that they had seen the godly beauty over the city.

"Working so hard every day and night and now we get the payback…" Bridget was singing to herself as the ley lines of the planet pulled her flying along at a height of fifty feet over the street. "Trying so hard to save up the paper, now we get to lay back… Champagne kisses hold me in your lap of luxury. I want to fly first-class desires, you're my luxury…" Her left arm reached out as she banked northward over Woodward Avenue with pedestrians below struggling to see her flitting form streaking over their heads. She had a lot more to be happy with in her life. She had found her future in being this mysterious person who rescued the innocent and punished the corrupt and unlawful, and thanks to these powers given her, she had secured her future on the mortal level with the accruement of this ridiculous notion of monetary gain for material objects. She had seen the truth. Any vestige of her old self was gone except as a momentary face every once in a while. The young girl had fallen in love with the concept of doing the right thing and helping mortal man where normal human law enforcement could not. Her nearly clairvoyant senses detected a silent burglary alarm on the next block.

Several blocks over, Devon Martinez, Hector Alvarez and Miguel Delgado had quit school because they were tired of the rules and the adults trying to turn them into decent human beings. They much more preferred being dregs of society and embarrassments to their families. Hector's father said if he was arrested once more that he was going to thrown out on to the street. Miguel's grandmother had already washed her hands of his indecency. She told people she had no grandson. Devon forgot he even had family as he traveled in and out of juvenile hall flaunting the law, destroying his health with drugs and promising to clean up his act. The problem was that none of them wanted to work for a living. Cleaning out the jewelry store would give them one night to degrade further into disposable rejects of society despite the thought of working into making a future. When picking the lock to the back door didn't work, Devon started pounding it with a hammer. He really hated these triple deadbolt security doors. If there were someone inside, he'd kill the guy just for making him work hard to break down the door. There was a rush of air as he continued pounding.

"Hey, where'd Hector go?" Devon looked up.

"He was just here." Miguel looked around just as another rush of air poured past him. Devon noticed the streak of red rush past him and vanished himself from sight. In the back of his mind, he realized what was happening and dropped his sledgehammer to flee back into the criminal underground away from the normal world. An illegal weapon in the form of a stolen .35-millimeter in his hand, the young African American stole through the shadows around trashcans and backed to the wall rearing his weapon. The breeze picked up again and he fired into the darkness.

"Come get me, b…." He only got three shots off and the breath was knocked from his body. He felt his back smashed into the wall to take the fight out of him and then the sharp stabbing pain of his genitals forced up into his body. His underwear band was being pulled up over his head and when he opened his eyes to scream, he found himself, Hector and Miguel strung up by their underwear bands up on to a cell phone tower twelve stories off the ground.

Parked at the ball field near Elton Park, Brad McKinnon parked his Monte Carlo facing the darkened sports field and turned beaming to Shelia Castellari. They both went to Elliot Brown High School and had been friends since childhood. Lisa's brother didn't like Brad. He was known for multiple girlfriends and for conduct less becoming a true gentleman. He wanted his baby sister to do much better, but Shelia ignored the better advice and dated Brad anyway. He sort of resembled Leonardo DiCaprio, and all the girls envied her to be dating him. Parked alone not far from their school, Brad looked at her with that shy grin and caressed her cheek as they kissed, but she pulled back as his hands reached to her chest.

"Brad…" Shelia held off. "No… I don't go that far. My father would kill me."

"Your father?" Brad didn't get this. "What about me? I've spent over a hundred dollars taking you out. What about me?"

"Is that all you want?" Shelia looked at him as he sat back and looked away. When he turned back, he was not the boy whose hand at trembled at her kiss. He was determined to get something from her. His hand pounded her head into the window and he undid his seatbelt to get on top of her. Shelia's voice started screaming at the top of her lungs. This boy she liked was pounding her head into the door and her mind was drifting away. She felt hands on her clothes, fingers under her blouse and buttons popping from her body.

The car jostled hard and the overhead window shattered from hands reaching through it. Something grabbed the young rapist by the belt and hoisted him up be his underwear. Unaware of what was happening, Brad McKinnon was lifted off his feet by hands that could bend tempered steel and throw around train cars.

"What part of "no" did you just not understand?!!!" Bridget stood on the roof of the car and shook him wanting to rattle some sense into his head. "Do you like raping nice girls or is that the only way you can get them?!!!"

"No, ma'am!!!" The high school rapist shrieked scared for his life.

"Are you going to be okay?" Bridget looked to Shelia.

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Good." Bridget held Brad up by one hand on his neck. He was choking to catch his breath. "Brad says drive yourself home. We're going to have a nice talk about forced potty training!" Her feet levitated up off the car carrying McKinnon with her. She hated guys like this and she was going to teach him an extra strong lesson. If he was going to think by the crotch, he was going to lose it to learn how to use his real brain.

"Not the underwear!!!!"

On Interstate 94, twenty-two year old Michelle Pickler fought to get her car started. All she did was flick on the turn signal to head for home and the car had turned and stalled in the minute of the road. It was pitch dark out, countless headlights swerving around her and her emergency lights flashing. Her car was on its last legs. Twenty years old, everything had been replaced twice. It had turned all zeros and was nearing it again. Formerly her late father's Tempo, she grieved and turned the ignition over and over and over. She could not afford a new car. She needed this one to last a few more years until she could afford it. Her life was spiraling and crashing around her. Her car refused to start as trucks swerved to miss hitting her. Tears rushing down her face, her fingers turning the key over and over and her foot pumping the gas, she just had to get off the Interstate before someone actually hit her and violently ejected her into her next life. She wanted to kill herself. This car was draining her bank accountant dry.

"Oh god, Oh god…" She continued crying and fighting the mysterious workings of the gas combustion system. "Please God! Get me out of here! What's wrong with this god-forsaken…" Her car suddenly jolted forward rolling ahead and off the Interstate for her off-ramp. Grabbing her steering wheel to guide her forward, she looked to the lights on her dashboard. The engine light and oil light were still on. There was no sign or sound of the engine running, but she was moving! Her apartment house was coming up and she pressed the brake to slow. The steering wheel barely turned, but she still rolled into her usual spot before the car completely died. She jumped from the car and looked at it trying to solve her miracle. While she stood looking at her twenty-year old car, her head cocked up to the blonde girl in the red cape from behind it rising aloft into the dark sky.

Another high school student named Matt Stokes was working the late shift at the Mobil Gas off Dexter Street. Mostly working on his homework, he turned on the gas pumps and sold drinks and cigarettes until he was relieved at midnight. He'd been on this job for only about a year and had only been held up twice. Tonight would make it three times. A large burly black man without a mask stormed in wielding a shotgun and aimed it at Matt.

"Give me the cash, now!" He ordered. When Matt didn't react first enough, he shattered the pickle jar on the counter and fired into the wall.

"You think I'm kidding?!!! I said now!!!"

The glass door shattered and the middle-aged felon vanished. He was there one minute and gone the next. It was as if he had just vanished. The shotgun had sounded off once more but from the restroom area. Matt held the cash from the register ready to hand it over then thought a second and slowly put it back. As he reseparated it accordingly back into his cash drawer, he heard pitiful whimpering coming from the back of the store. He looked up wondering what was happening.

Emerging from the stock room, Bridget Hennessey strolled out wearing her Supergirl costume. Her cape lightly swaying from her shoulders, her stocking boots scuffing on the clean tile floor, she casually strided over to the drink cooler and took out a bottle of green tea. Two dollars from a pouch on her belt, she wandered up to Matt and paid for her drink.

"You might want to call 911 now." She replied uncapping her drink and sipping it. "He'll be here for a while." Matt started handing her change. "Oh, keep it…" She strolled out of the structure over the shattered glass door on the floor. Her head looked heavenward and she departed earth once more.

"Bridget's not home yet…" In the Hennessy house on Oakdale Drive, Rory played computerized wrestling with his father. "You think she was delayed stopping a meteor from hitting the planet?"

"I think we've all proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that girl is not our Bridget." Cate spent her night off catching up on housework with a load of laundry. "She's on a date."

"Or maybe that's what she wants us to think." Kerry sat on the sofa and looked up from her book. "We still haven't figured out how she got that…" She paused rising from her seat still annoyed by the incident. "Tuition."

"Maybe, your sister is just smarter than we…." Paul started giggling. "I can't say it. I just couldn't say it."

"Paul…" Cate looked at him for that remark. "I refuse to believe that…" She looked to Kerry then to Rory. "Maybe we ought to have someone follow her just to be sure."

"Yes, thank you!" Kerry stood shaking an uncooked popcorn packet from the kitchen. "We haven't yet let Bridget off the hook! You all still have some suspicions left!"

"Kerry…" Cate shifted her weight with the dirty laundry. "Bridget is not that girl… but I admit it'd be so good if we knew for sure."

"She got a writing tuition!" Kerry fumed and started her late night snack in the microwave.

"She was in Canada for a weekend!" Cate argued back.

"Bullets bounce off her bra!" Rory barely looked up from his video cartoon character. Paul unplugged his game to erase the game as punishment.

"Does it matter?" Paul reverted to being the peacemaking father. "If she is or not, she's still the Bridget we know and love, and I for one don't care if she is not." He noticed Cate looking at him for want of support.

"I'm home…" The blonde one excused herself into her home. "Oh god, I think William could be the one."

"I thought you were out with Steven." Cate looked to her firstborn.

"Mom, Steven was so last month." Bridget clutched her chest happily beaming. "William actually listens to me. He gets me."

"Oh yeah…" Rory started responding with a crack. "This is someone I want rescuing me from getting shot." His father swatted him with a pillow to quiet him.

"Bridget, I'm collecting the laundry to do in the morning…" Cate sighed looking at her daughter. "Turn over the sweater so I can wash it."

"Wash it?" Bridget reacted as if she were questioning the notion. "But… it's not dirty. Here… want to smell it?"

"Bridget…" Cate wondered what was going on.

"Yeah, Bridget…" Kerry strolled from the kitchen into this confrontation. "You're not wearing anything under it that you wouldn't want us to see… are you?" She was grinning ear to ear. This was it. The moment of truth! She was finally… finally… busted!

"No… course not…" Bridget tossed her purse into the chair by her, and reached down slowly to the bottom of her turtleneck sweater. Her father had glanced up. Rory had paused his video game to look up. Cate reached up for the extra piece of laundry as her middle daughter beamed ear-to-ear. Looking around the room, Bridget's eyes glimpsed into the direction of the microwave in the kitchen, and it exploded. The door flung open spraying Kerry's bag of popcorn and a few sparks flew from the plug on the wall. The malfunctioning appliance had scared and surprised everyone as they jumped or looked back at it, more than enough time for a person to move at nearly the speed of light.

"Kerry… How much time did you give it?" Paul hastened over and pulled the plug. The entire house was going to smell of burned popcorn. Cate clutched her heart at the impromptu distraction glad the house was not on fire. It was bound to happen sooner or later. They'd had the microwave for eleven years now. It barely warmed TV dinners and sometimes barely cooked leftovers. It was going to explode sooner or later.

"It was only in for three minutes!" Kerry revealed.

"Here, mom…" Bridget turned over her turtleneck. "Could you have it ready for tomorrow? I look so good in it."

Kerry twisted her head back around to see her sister wearing a loose chemise instead of what she was expecting. Grumbling and cursing under breath, she realized she had lost again and furled and unfurled her fists. Bridget's secret identity was still a secret!

"You exploded that microwave!!!" She accused her.

"Like how would I do that…" Bridget flipped her hair at the notion and skipped up the front staircase to get ready for bed. Kerry was right on her heels ready to wring her neck. Holding the basket of dirty laundry, Cate looked at her feuding daughters and sighed exasperatingly. Paul had stopped trying to salvage eatable popcorn and was pulling out the overused microwave to haul to the front curb.

"You'd think she'd stop trying to bust her sister." Paul hoisted the microwave up on to his arms.

"You'd think Bridget wasn't so good covering it up." Rory quipped out loud.


	19. Chapter 19

There was an on-going petition going through the courts to arrest or stop the so-called female superhero presence putting gang members and criminals into the hospital. It was too much a joke that young punks and teenage felons were too scared to break the law because another teenage drug user was in the hospital with shattered legs or that another middle-aged pedophile nearly had his underwear pulled over his head. The district attorney was not going to press charges against an entity that in the real world just could not exist. If they actually placed a warrant on the town's Supergirl for countless assault and battery, District Attorney Ted Hardison revealed, they might as well put one out on Dracula for genocide and another on Santa Claus for decades of breaking and entering.

"You can't just keep replacing parts." In an apartment house five blocks off the interstate, Terri Pickler argued with her daughter. "That car is over twenty years old. You need a new one."

"Mom, I can't afford it!" Michelle argued back. "I've got a daughter to support by myself! Bill said he'd replace the alternator again; that will buy me more time."

"Your brother cannot keep that car going much further." Mother clashed with daughter. "It should have been junked years ago. If course, if you hadn't gotten pregnant in high school…"

"Don't go there!" Michelle snapped. "I haven't asked you for anything! You don't have any right to criticize my life!" Someone knocked at the door of her apartment. What were a few more minutes late for work? Hoping it was her ride, Michelle grabbed her jacket, pulled it on over the restaurant uniform for the Italian Bar and Grill in Detroit's eatery district and grabbed her purse. It wasn't Amanda Jennings at the door. It was a young girl with long blonde hair, a bulky jacket disguising her frame and a dark cap pulled down over to hide her face.

"Miss Pickler?" Bridget's voice replied and she held up a large envelope. "This is for you."

"Thank you…" Michelle took the strange envelope. Her mysterious benefactor turned away enigmatically and hastened away for places unknown. Wondering what sort of delivery she had acquired, she rendered her finger through the opening and popped open the top. She didn't believe it at first. It was several hundred dollars. Twenty five hundred dollars to be exact wrapped in an ad for a used car lot. A few used cars had been circled in the ad. Attached was a note: "Michelle, get a new car, S."

At the hospital, Cate Hennessey guided and took care of the patients. Another young mother suffered through labor pains until a room became available. A mom sat with her son to get him a tetanus shot. Another figure on the cusp of middle age waited to get his chest pains checked out. Cate waited taking blood pressure from him as he waited on Dr. Masterson or Dr. Grey. When he passed out of the danger zone, she headed out to secure a room for the expecting mother as the Emergency paramedics wheeled in another potential patient.

"All I did was try to steal a Mercedes!!" He was screaming in pain. "Was that so wrong?"

"Yes…" Cate checked him over. The young Hispanic's underwear band had been pulled almost a foot out the seat of his pants. The result was more severe damage to his lower extremities for indulging in a criminal career. It was the hundred-and eighty-ninth case for this hospital so far.

"He was pulled down off the billboard on Bauman Drive." Paramedic Carl Ferrigno reported with a smirk and turned the patient's chart over to Cate. Assistant nurse Marcy Walker started grinning ear to ear with a smug happy grin to her face. The young carjacker would have to wait for the next available room.

"I love this girl!" Marcy giggled to Cate over the felon. "I love her underwear fixation. It's about time these creeps got what they get coming to them."

"Marcy!" Cate chided her co-worker for that comment.

"Come on, Cate…" Marcy handed Cate a syringe of morphine. "I just wish she was around a year ago when I got mugged." Marcy grimaced sarcastically and looked down the hall to Dr. Masterson helping the pregnant girl. "I think I know who she is."

"Who?" Cate looked up with alarm.

"Come on, Cate, " Marcy leaned in secretly. "It's so obvious."

"Oh god, Marcy, please, don't…"

"It's Dr. Masterson." Marcy whispered to her under breath.

"What?"

"Think about it…" The plump but cute middle-aged mother continued. "Everyone says she looks like Reese Witherspoon. Liz looks like Reese Witherspoon. We know nothing about her private life. She got a shock from the X-Ray Machine the week before all these sightings…."

"You think…" Cate stopped and tilted her back listening. "Liz got special powers off an X-Ray Machine?"

"Yes!" Marcy insisted.

"What have we got here, ladies?" Dr. John Dorian poked past them.

"Oh, another impacted underwear…" Cate looked up and handed over the patient's file.

"What is this?" Dorian scowled looking over the file. "Two hundred this month?" Marcy had drifted off doing her job, but as she passed Dr. Masterson, she gave her a hearty and beaming thumbs-up. Liz just looked up at the gesture and wondered about it before moving on. Cate stayed with Dorian to prep and cut the underwear strung up around the Mexican youth's buttocks so the police could take him into custody. Strolling through intensive care, Cate checked on a burn patient from a home fire, another person possibly rescued by her daughter. In the bed next to him, Brad McKinnon lay on his stomach in incredible pain. He was going to need invasive surgery just to be able to go to the bathroom.

"Honey…" Cate padded his back. "I've got you something for the pain, but the doctors will need to take you into surgery this afternoon to remove your underwear. The good news is: the Castellari family settled out of court. You've only got a year of jail to serve."

"All I wanted is for her to like me!" The teenage rapist blubbered through his pain. That flying blonde had not only pulled his underwear up but had hung himself upside-down on a flagpole at city hall as a warning to other rapists!

"Oh yeah…" Cate gave McKinnon more morphine for the pain. "Raping her was a good way to do that!" She gave him a shot for the pain and discomfort to his manhood. As she moved on to a young woman with food poisoning, she looked up to Dr. Masterson strolling through checking the charts. Adjusting dosages and recommending new meds, the young beauty chanced upon Cate and gestured to her to talk. A moment to provide a comforting look to the young lady, Cate draped her stethoscope round her neck and glided toward Liz in the shadowy alcove of the medicine closet. The petite doctor looked up to her taller head nurse.

"Cate, I respect your opinion a lot and I want you to tell me something." Liz pretended to be checking inventory. "I need to know what all these…" She made a thumbs-up. "Gestures are going round me. Is there a rumor about me here?"

"It's really harmless. Kind of silly…" Cate adjusted some boxes to line up. Dr. Masterson cocked her head wanting the answer. "Um…" Cate continued. "Marcy and several others think you're that…" She chuckled a bit. "Supergirl in the news." She hid her smirk as Liz reacted absorbing the news. "Apparently, you look like her… a lot!"

"What?" Dr. Liz Masterson reacted with a mixture of ego, honor and embarrassment. "This makes so much sense. After _Legally Blonde_ came out, I was getting approached by people who thought I was Reese Witherspoon." She paused and shifted her weight to her other leg. "What do you think?"

"I don't believe it myself." Cate confessed then became honestly frank. "To tell the truth, I think everyone has some sort of candidate they think she is. I mean…" She chuckled under breath. "My daughter, Kerry… She's been harassing her sister because she's convinced that she's Supergirl." She shared a stifled laugh.

"You mean, Bridget…" Liz reacted. "I could see that, but it is so not her. I examined Bridget. I drew blood from her and did a very thorough test. In my medical opinion, I can honestly say it is definitely not her!"

"Son of a…!!!" Bridget gripped her fingers around the back frame of a Nissan hatchback and once more started ascending skyward. As she wretched the car out of the reservoir, she began placing her hands in a better place to carry it. Hoping this teenage driver would listen more to the sound of screeching brakes than to his radio station, she glided effortlessly up over the bank and on to the side of the road. Someone else would have to fix the flattened fence. Eric Kutcher waited till all four tires of his car were back on terra firma as he and his girlfriend, Laura Hyde, were well out of the water. Bolting from the car, he and his friends raced to meet the blonde goddess to finally see her up close, but she had avoided being recognized once more by rushing away from the scene and flying out over the park toward the east side of town.

"Hey there…" Kyle Brady wandered into his bank with a check to his private account made out to cash. "Some money, por favor…" He mused to the bank teller to get some spending money for school and then noticed the lollipop tin on the edge of the counter. He immediately snatched a cherry flavor and ripped the plastic wrapper from it to stick in his mouth. As he stood waiting for his cash to be handed from him, someone came up behind him and knocked him hard to the floor.

"Hand over all the money!" Robert Edmunds and his three cohorts had been knocking over banks between Chicago and St. Louis. With the police looking for him along Interstate 55, he had slipped through the dragnet and escaped north to knock over a Detroit bank. His brother served as lookout in the getaway car with a police scanner and his cousin Stanley and two friends infiltrated the bank in a job they had timed to under a minute. Shooting out cameras and violently striking anyone who got in their way, they waved their illegal weapons ready to shoot to kill. Once he realized what was happening, Kyle hugged the course bank carpet with his hands over his head. In his head, he prayed he didn't get shot. Several bullets rendered through the plaster and wood structure as a hot knife through butter. People screamed and dived under and behind furniture. Teller Daphne Pryde felt her red hair pulled into a handle behind her head as Stanley Edmunds treated her as a disposable witness. Kyle clenched his eyes shut trying to ignore the deafening noise around him. He wanted to be a hero, but he couldn't move.

A glass skylight shattered and figure dropped into the bank moving at the speed of light. Five-time felon Todd Jamison was attacked first with a force of a hundred bricks kicked into his abdomen. Stanley Edmunds watched as his partner flew twelve feet across the bank lobby and hit the wall with a sickening crunch. He started firing upon the blonde in the red cape coming at him. He had killed girls smaller than she was. The girl might have been fast, she might have been strong, but he had the bullets and they scattered and strafed the walls upon ricocheting off her head and chest. To her, the sensation was like being pelted with a volley of cooked peas. Bridget charged forward again with the force of a hurricane and struck Stanley to his chest with one blow then turned to Jamison trying to cleave her head in two. Two slow for someone moving at the speed of sound, his elbow was shattered with the tip of her left hand. A brief moment for the joy of bending the Uzi into a paperweight, Bridget whirled round and looked to Robert Edmunds. He had heaved Kyle up off the floor as a human shield. They recognized each other!

"Bridget?!"

"One more fast move, and the geek gets it!!!" Edmunds refused to go to jail for his crimes.

Bridget reacted instinctively and charged forward as Robert's finger curled round the trigger of his weapon. There was an explosion next to Kyle's ear and he flailed to one side and fell to the floor. His body dropped into a heap, his eyes rolling back into his head and his legs going limp. It all happened within a second, but he was still alive. He had landed on his right shoulder, but as he opened his eyes he saw the bullet landing in front of him on the floor after him. It bounced once and then rolled round once facing him. How close had it been? He lay there a second wondering what was happening then reached over and took the bullet in his fingers. The bank lobby was stifled into silence. Nervous bank tellers, some of them still crying and afraid lifted up their heads. In the aftermath of the foiled robbery, witnesses, employees and customers slowly stood up or peeked from their hiding places. The lone security guard took his handcuffs and restrained Todd Jamison to the entryway. Stanley Edmunds was whimpering and bawling over his shattered right arm, the end of it hanging limply from his elbow. Everyone was asking each other about where was the third shooter and the Motor City's girl of steel. Had it really happened? What just happened here? Kyle rose up off the floor holding the bullet and searching for signs of a hole in his head.

There was a screaming noise from over their heads and Robert Edmunds fell through the shattered skylight, grazing and bouncing off the edge and then plummeting the twenty feet to the floor. The back of his underwear had been pulled up through his buttocks and he lit the hard floor with a thundering crunch, braking his left arm, collar bone and a few ribs as an added punishment for his life of crime and flaunting the law. Bawling with the screams of a giant baby, Edmunds screamed out in pain and looked up to the early evening sky to the object falling through it. His stolen Uzi had been balled into scrap metal, a cannonball to hit and bounce off his skull from off the roof. He began cursing a streak of profanity between blubbering words of nonsense from his wracked and broken body.

Somewhere outside, police cars were converging on the bank with lights flaring and sirens calling. Between the bank employees and customers praying and distantly thanking their local heroine, Kyle inched closely to Robert to look up through the shattered skylight. As he peered up through that opening, he heard the police cars arrive outside. Officers began escorting survivors and witnesses from the building. Kyle Brady could only search the skies for the girl who still had his heart.

"Bridget…." He whispered to his own ears.


	20. Chapter 20

Captain Kevin Campbell was a fourteen-year veteran of Detroit's Third Precinct. He had been on the site of nearly every major crime in the city's history from gang shootings, crash-and-stash robberies to false bomb threats in the schools. These alleged ghost sightings of the girl in this costume in his city were irking him on several levels. Was she real? Who was she? Where did she come from? The bank manager pulled the videos cameras and played them back. Edmunds and his gang invaded the bank in a choreographed ritual waving their weapons and shooting out every camera they saw, and less than a minute after their arrival, the anamorphous form dropped from the ceiling and attacked the two accomplices. It seemed the more vicious the crime the more ruthless this girl was. She could not be taped. Some force about her person distorted light around her so she could not be identified or filmed. After dropping Jamison and the cousin, she had whirled round and grabbed up Robert, pulling him up with her into the ceiling to be dropped a minute later from a long height.

"I got a call from the hospital." Lieutenant Adam Normandy came up behind his superior. "Edmunds and his gang are in critical. They'll live, but they can't leave intensive care for a month."

"What kind of entity is this girl?" Campbell replayed and analyzed the security footage on the bank security system. "Everything tells me she doesn't exist, but she keeps turning up more often than Bigfoot."

"I saw her." Bank manager Brenda Doherty shook her hair out of her azure blue eyes and sat backward on the edge of the counter. "She looked like a young teenage girl like a lot of the girls I see shopping at the mall, but she's fast… very fast. I saw her doing things no normal person should be able to do, and I didn't hallucinate it either. She seems just as real as she seems to be."

"There is no such thing as a bulletproof person." Campbell hit the replay button and replayed the bullet ricocheting off the blonde one. "Maybe she wears a bulletproof flak-jacket or the costume itself is bullet resistant…"

"Those shots didn't even knock her over." Doherty folded her arms across her chest. "I'll tell you something else. People love this girl. Who or what she is… the city is rallying behind her."

"I'm sending this tape to the FBI Forensics lab…" Campbell popped the tape and handed it to Normandy. "Maybe they can get something out of it to explain what she is. Real or not, some how, some way, we'll figure out what she really is."

It was Monday night for the Hennessy family of Oakdale Drive and Paul had ordered out to the Country House Restaurant for their family dinner take-out, a night of video rentals watching movies the family enjoyed. He enjoyed these nights because it meant he had his loved ones close. Cate had to work a few hours and was on her way home. Rory was before the TV in his usual spot: watching a simulated ghost town through the television as he controlled an animated weapon blowing up zombies and animated corpses. Kerry was her usual self… sarcastically withdrawn and curled up with a book, but this time it wasn't one of the classics or a selection from the school reading list. She was reading _The Science of Superheroes_, a tome of how science worked in the real world and how it matched the exaggerated science of the comic book universe. Cate acknowledged the title of her book and rolled her eyes to her husband. Kerry's obsession with her sister was getting worse. She pointed it out and directed Paul to silently acknowledge it. Paul just voiced his detractions and shrugged his shoulders unsure what to do about it.

"When do we eat?" Rory blasted another animated zombie.

"When your sister gets home." Paul popped a Brussels sprout into his mouth while preparing plates for his family.

"I don't know…" Rory prepared for another snide comment. "Those meetings at the Avengers mansion sometimes run long." He smirked picturing the whole thing. Batman brooding in the corner, Superman and the Hulk arm-wrestling, Captain America banging the gavel for order, Thor and Hercules saying things about gods and demons, Hawkeye propositioning the Wasp and Bridget talking clothes and shopping with Wonder Woman and Storm of the X-Men. "They could get attacked by the Legion of Doom or something."

"You're not funny…" Cate walked over and unplugged his game. There was a noise from upstairs and Kerry lifted her head to the noise. There was a sound of water being turned off that wasn't heard while Rory's game was playing. Paul stopped spooning mashed potatoes as he glanced up and saw Bridget coming down the back stairway.

"Is dinner ready yet?" Clad in a loose t-shirt and sweat pants, she was brushing out her long damp hair. She looked as if she had just come out of the shower.

"Where did you come from?!" Kerry looked up at her with alarm.

"The stork brought me???" Bridget didn't understand the question.

"Bridget…" Cate took this one. "We've been waiting for you for over an hour. When did you get home?"

"I came in through the back door when you and dad were fighting over the Brussels sprouts…" Bridget's voice twisted annoyingly as she survived the interrogation and gestured to her route. "I said I wanted to take a shower and you said yeah-yeah…" She told and replayed the conversation she had overheard while entering the house from the second floor window. "Didn't you hear me?"

"Oh…." Cate found herself on the spot. She had said yeah-yeah to someone behind her, but she had thought it was a response to Kerry being okay to the choice of vegetables. In her mind, maybe Bridget had come in through the back door at that time and she just hadn't noticed. "I'm sorry honey, I guess I didn't see you."

"Oh-my-god!!!" Kerry refused to believe this manipulation worked! "I can't believe this! She came in through the upstairs window!"

"Whatever…" Bridget refused to acknowledge this debate.

"Okay, that is it!" Paul raised his voice to put this great family mystery to an end. He started heading toward the front door because he thought he'd heard someone knocking. "I'm putting an end to this right here and now. There is no evidence nor has there every been any evidence of Bridget ever being anything but a normal teenage girl." He opened the front door.

"Hey, Papa H, is Bridget…" Kyle Brady was on the front stoop looking in to the house. It had taken thirty minutes to give his statement to the police about the incident at the bank and then he headed straight here to find his former girlfriend. He looked into the house and noticed the blonde one.

"Bridget, I never knew! I never realized!!" He started heading toward her with his arms open to hug her. "You saved my life!!!" Bridget made a face and backed away from him around the sofa and past her brother.

"What are you talking about?!" Bridget winced from being touched. She raced past her father avoiding Kyle from hugging her.

"You were incredible!!" Kyle was singing the songs of praise upon realizing the girl he worshipped and his old girlfriend were one and the same. "Those bullets bouncing off your chest…" He mimicked and danced his fingers against him imitating what he had seen. "The way you threw those guys around… I love you!!"

Cate and Paul reacted in disbelief upon hearing what he was describing. Paul did a double take, Cate clutched her chest trying to catch her breath and Rory was following Kyle around beaming and listening to his story. Kerry had jumped up laughing and dancing in front of the television. This was it! This was her proof! It was over for Bridget! She was outed!! It was so perfect. It was a long time coming, but this was it! This was her evidence!!! Other witness!!!

"Get away from me!" Bridget fled from Kyle around her mother and into the kitchen.

"Tell us again." Rory came up alongside Kyle. "What did she do again?"

"Yeah…" Kerry picked up her video recorder and aimed it at Kyle. "Slowly and using as many words as possible…"

"She was incredible!" Kyle looked at the family then to Kerry. "She dropped down out of the ceiling like Batman…" He was making sound effects and simulating the whole thing with his hands as he had for the police before they declared him an unworthy witness. "She threw this one guy across the room – Kerpow – She broke this one guy's arm with a karate chop – Whap - She turned round as this one guy pulled a gun on me and in a blink of an eye, she caught the bullet just before it hit me and dragged this guy up through the roof and dropped him with an incredible crash – Crash!" Kyle's face was beaming ear-to-ear and his heart was beating fast falling in love with Bridget all over again. Her eyes widened in fear and her hand to her heart, Bridget looked at him in confused shock as if she was hearing all of this for the first time. Cate was standing by her daughter trying to support her. Paul was still stuck at the front door unaware of what had just happened.

"Don't worry, Bridget." Kyle looked across to her with love in his eyes. "I didn't tell the police your true identity." He was grinning excitedly, unable to restrain himself. "After all, I think that should be just between us when we get married. You will marry me, right?"

Bridget began screaming in disgust as her mother stood between her and Kyle. Paul had heard enough. No one scared his daughter to tears and got away with it.

"Okay!!!" Paul rushed to stop this spectacle from occurring. "Out you go, through the door or out the window!!!" He grabbed both Kyle and Rory and dragged them both to the front landing and pushed them both out the door to the porch. It took a minute for him to realize he was tossing his son out the door with Tommy's kid. Rory looked as confused as his father was and escaped back into the house just as his father slammed the door closed.

"I love you, Bridget!!!" Kyle screamed to the neighborhood from the front yard.

"Bridget…" Laughing and enjoying herself, Kerry was still videotaping Bridget backed to the kitchen sink in shock. "Do you have a rebuttal to that?" She scoffed laughing.

"That girl is not me!!" Bridget declared again. "I don't care how much she looks like me!!" Her hands were trembling in fear. Her voice wavering from the accusation, she was being held up by her other's arms. "I am not that…" She suddenly bent over and expelled her stomach contents into the kitchen sink. Her nerves were fraying. The stress was killing her. Cate loving stroked her daughter's back and cooed to her as she did when Bridget was a baby. Kerry was still taping as Paul and Rory watched the ordeal Bridget was suffering.

"Honey, I'm here…" Cate whispered to her daughter and held Bridget's shaking hands while pulling her hair out of her face. "Kerry, get that camera out of her face!!" Cate screamed and Kerry started lowering her handheld.

"Mom…" Her head hung over the sink, Bridget coughed and spit the bile out of her mouth. "This is going to ruin my life. No one is ever going to believe me. I can't go to school if this gets out…" Her mother handed her some water.

"Honey…" Cate rubbed her daughter's back tenderly. "It won't get out. I promise you…"

Rory thought of a wisecrack he could have said and restrained himself from saying it. Paul felt useless in this his daughter's moment of need. He didn't know what to do to fix this.

"No, you can't…" Bridget sniffed and lifted her head to tears dripping down her face. "If Kyle doesn't do it, Kerry will…" She tore past her mother and up the back stairs crying and bawling. The door to her bedroom slammed shut and Paul Hennessey the family patriarch sighed and rubbed his head trying to think of what to do. Rory mused silently taking his dinner plate from the counter and picking at his vegetables. Cate glared at Kerry for being part of the problem.

"I told you to stop persecuting your sister!" She yelled.

"You can't possibly believe her!!!" Kerry hissed back. "Every time we get close to busting her something happens and we have to ignore it! I'm tired of ignoring it!! I want her to tell the truth!!!"

"What truth!!" Cate yelled back. "The truth is that you're still hostile you lost that tuition to college and you're terrorizing your sister for it! You are going to coast into college on a scholarship, but Bridget needed that tuition! I don't care if that girl looks like Bridget or Britney Spears! I've got two daughters here and right now, I'm liking my first born much more over the hostile second born!!! You're the one who needs to get a life!" Cate pounded the counter and turned racing after her blonde daughter. Rory shied away eating his dinner, and Paul stood holding his chest and looking at Kerry.

"Why is this so important to you?" He asked her. "If it were Bridget, I'd think you'd want to be supportive of her." He gazed upon her disapprovingly and turned away taking his plate, but he really didn't have an appetite. He dropped it on the table I the dining room and sat alone on the dark reflecting on what just happened. Kerry could only look away to pretend to be interested in her camera. She didn't know what to say. The house was becoming awkwardly quiet except for Cate knocking at the girl's bedroom door.

"Beej, please unlock the door." She lovingly rapped on the door. "Honey, I believe you…" Her daughter was not answering. Beyond her knowledge, the room was empty. Sweatpants draped across the bed, a t-shirt on the table before the open window and curtains flailing in the breeze outside. Somewhere in the neighborhood, Kyle was walking home from the Hennessy house still glowing with his illicit new knowledge. His former girlfriend was the mysterious girl all of Detroit was wondering about. How could he not have seen that? His mind was still trying to wrap around it as he wondered what to do with it. Continuing along his usual route for home, he stepped off the curb for his street and was lurched off his feet. Images whizzed past his eyes and he was rolling and sliding across the roof of a seafood restaurant ten blocks from his house. It was a hard and abrupt landing and he was sure he had bruised his elbow in the fall. He rolled his eyes around trying to focus and looked up to Bridget towering over him. Clad in her red and blue costume, she stood over him and reached down grabbing him by his shirt.

"Come here, you little creep…"

"What?" He was lurched up like a rag doll and tossed over her head. He slammed down again feeling his vertebrae dancing and jostling back into place. She was holding back a lot of hostility. He knew she could do much more if she wanted. He skidded and reached for the ladder to the roof, but her hand grabbed him by the collar and lifted him off his feet again. She pinned his back to the rigging for the neon sign. Kyle wiggled his feet trying to touch the roof.

"You disgusting, ferret-faced, wormy little geek…" She hissed through her teeth. "What gives you the right to barge into my home and scream out you saw me save your freaking useless little life?!"

"Bridget, wait, I…"

"Did I give you permission to talk?!" Bridget snapped. Her face was scowling with sheer hostility. "Do you know how hard it is just to keep them confused and unaware of what I'm doing?! Do you think I want those turnip heads at school from knowing?!! Do you know how vicious teenagers can be? Do you? Do you?!" She pounded him back and forth into the supporting beam. The neon sign even rattled a bit.

"Bridget!!"

"In one night, you have nearly undone all the hard work I've done!" Bridget hissed and hurled Kyle up into the air. Flying up twenty feet, Kyle flailed and flipped over to his back and started descending. Arching her head back, Bridget soared up off the roof, clutched him to her bosom and landed on the roof of the hospital several more blocks away. Kyle dropped and landed on the seat of his pants. Scared for his life, he started crawling away for the nearest door, but Bridget scooped him up again and threw him to the wall once more.

"What are you going to do?!" He screamed at her. She wrapped his head in her hands as if she was going to crush it and stared into his eyes. Her eyes looked him up and over and pressed her body closer. Her facial features were softer, her demeanor more placid. Bridget tilted her head to the side and closed her lips over his. Kyle winced at the presence of her soft face against his and slowly calmed down, his hands carefully embracing her back. His mind was feeling dizzy with her touch. In her presence, he fell under her spell.

"Kyle…" Bridget whispered into his ear. "Your mind is mine now, your thoughts are mine to control. You will forget what you saw and recall only what I tell you… Do you understand?"

"Uh-huh…" He grinned goofily. Bridget grinned at him with a chuckle.

A few seconds later, Kyle was lying in the grass and walnut shells under the large oak of his back yard. Surrounded by the droppings of the family dog, Max the family rottweiler was licking his face and trying to rouse him awake. He had no memory of how he got there or of how he got home. He just swatted at Max licking his face and stepping in the feces of the yard and wiping it on him. Tommy stepped onto the back porch holding a cup of coffee and looking at his son rolling in the filth of the backyard.

"Drunk… just like his brother."

"Bridget, honey, please…" Cate continued trying to pry her daughter from her bedroom. "You haven't had din… Uh, are you okay? You're still in there I hope." She heard the door unlatching and the doorknob turning. Wearing her t-shirt and sweats, Bridget looked up through the door deflated and depressed. Her eyes were full of tears, her spirit was fragile and her heart heavy with emotion. Cate pulled her close and hugged her tightly trying to support her and give her love. Bridget just gasped and blinked her eyes a few times hoping things weren't about to spiral out of control any further.


	21. Chapter 21

The morning bells rang at Liberty High School. Seth Tanner grabbed up his books and rushed for gym class to make the time to watch the girls doing their aerobics. Shelia Odom and Shelley Billingsley made up vicious rumors about their female classmates: who was stuffing their bra and who might be sleeping around. What dirty lie could they make from Bridget Hennessy's absence today? Principal Gibb stopped Keely Michalka for chewing gum, and Scott Ullman argued with Kim Buckner in the school bookstore about the prices of the school supplies. Horace Patterson and Lyle Diffy were smoking in the boys' restroom and quickly stopped as Principal Gibb charged in to catch them. As they denied it, the dried paper hand towels in the waste receptacle burst into flame from the burning cigarettes. After the fire alarm was pulled, the herding and unherding of students and the suspension of Horace and Lyle, Kerry Hennessy tried to maneuver through the meandering crowds of students looking for Kyle. She had missed him this morning at the front entrance of the school. Drifting between crowds of boys swapping offensive jokes, she parted between a coven of gossiping prima donnas and a group of stoned rejects. Mrs. Lassiter the math teacher moved past her trying to get to her classroom before another school reject tried down-loading porn from her computer. Ambling down past the library, Kerry finally found Kyle holding up the wall at Owen Wosmer's locker with the rest of the under-achievers.

"Kyle, I've been looking for you." Kerry stood holding her books before her on one arm and her purse and book bag off her other arm.

"I'm right here." Kyle looked at her then applauded Owen for the story about the nun, the duck and the bar. Kerry groaned exasperatingly and pulled Kyle from his male-bonding ritual. She pulled up from off the wall he was leaning on and pinned him covertly in the corner next to the soda machine into the lunchroom lobby.

"Look, Kyle…" Kerry gasped tiredly annoyed for a second. "About last night, what you screamed about Bridget was completely inappropriate. It really upset her. Now, you know as well as I do what she's been doing, but outing her to everyone would ruin her life. I mean… She was practically hysterical by what you accused her of, but for now, I think we ought to keep it between us. For right now, we…"

"Kerry," Kyle scowled confusingly and searched his memories looking for a clue. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Kyle…." The red-haired middle child looked at him suspiciously. "You was at the bank when it was held up."

"Yeah," Kyle recalled that. "Everyone's been treating me like a celebrity or something asking about…"

"Focus here!" She restrained from choking him. "You was at the bank when Bridget showed up and saved your life."

"Bridget?" Kyle didn't recall it like that. "Bridget wasn't there!" He shook his head confusingly.

"Kyle!" Kerry pulled his ear to get his attention. "You barged into my house last night claiming Bridget was Supergirl!" She reminded him with a dull whisper.

"Come one, Kerry. I dated Bridget." Kyle rolled his eyes and scoffed at the notion. "She is nothing like Supergirl. I mean she is like really beautiful… more beautiful than Bridget. I mean you should have seen her. She…"

"Kyle!" Kerry was getting frustrated with him. "Stay with me here, okay?! You came by my house after the police and announced to my whole family that…" She stuck her hand into her purse to pull out her handheld and replay his testimony from the previous night.

"No, Kerry, I think you misunderstood." Kyle chuckled, looked away then focused back on Kerry. "I came by your house because I knew you were a fan too." He remembered his take of last night's events. "I mean you borrowed all those pictures from me. She looked nothing like Bridget. "

Kerry fought with her handheld. Her footage with Kyle was all distorted and ruined. She had interloping images of Rory on a dirt bike, her father yelling at Bridget for staying out late and herself at the park. How did this happen? She had not hallucinated last night!

"Oh my god!" She stared at him. "She got to you, didn't she?"

"Who? Who did what to me?" Kyle asked her. Kerry just looked away disgustedly and sighed defeatedly.

"I can't do this anymore." She told herself. "No matter what I do… she is always five steps ahead of me. I just… can't get her to confess."

"What?" Kyle tried to understand what she was talking about. "Who are you talking about? Hey, why didn't Bridget come to school?"

"You want the truth?" Kerry rolled her eyes sideways at him in disbelief. "She had a little stress attack after your confrontation last night. My mom and dad actually let her stay home to compose herself..."

Staying home was the furthest thing from Bridget's mind. She wanted to go running to gather her thoughts, but she had also made a promise she intended to keep and she chose to do her running several states away and hundreds of miles from Detroit jogging the park walkways of Denver's Cheesman Park. With the skyline of the city rising around her in the acreage of undisturbed land, she started from the portico and jogged the walkway listening and brooding with her thoughts. Her long hair pulled into a ponytail, her face expressionless and garbed in her gray sweats, she started slowly at first, her white sneakers pounding at the asphalt of the path with a rhythmic pulse of a ticking clock. Coming up along the waterway alongside the park, she increased her pace past another morning jogger that turned round to notice her then a homeless person sitting on a bench.

On approach of the marker describing the history of the park as a former cemetery, Bridget turned and jogged over the bridge over the creek and down through an open glen lined with wet flowers and near piles of raked brush. Her mind drifted to her youth, back to when she and Kerry were each other's best friends. They once did everything together. They once did the Norman Rockwell scene of selling lemonade; the playing dress-up out of their mother's closet, the worship of their father and the ritual competition of sniping and insulting each other, but then Junior High School happened and they found the world. Bridget found out that boys liked her and she absorbed their praise and worship through the eyes of school cliques and peer pressure. In her shadow, Kerry retreated into the intellectual shadow of school and lessons. Rory had come along too and changed the picture, seemingly becoming dad's favorite. Looking back now through the eyes of the world and the wisdom of time, Bridget realized now she had deciphered the picture wrong. She had never lost the love of her parents, but rather she had become frustrated by them not realizing how restricting the world of teenagers was. It was only as restricting as the boundaries she and Kerry had put on it. The world did not end beyond the school, it only seemed like it. Beyond it, the adult world made much more sense and had much more common sense to it. She now understood the restrictions her parents had been putting on her. She now had her purpose in life and she knew what to do with it.

Coming up under a bridge extending over her to the ground above, Bridget had jogged into the shadows of the park, along a fenced-off walkway along a babbling brook against a face of exposed bedrock and ascending up over brush covered in vines up the main park. She could hear the roadway from the cars echoing in her ears, and she could sense another person racing up behind her. His pulse was racing, his heart was beating and his feet methodical as if what he had to do was nothing personal. It was just something he had to do. She felt his hands grab her from behind and spin her round to face him. She saw the quick glint of his weapon just before it pierced into her abdomen… or tried to. The tempered-steel blade couldn't pierce her dense flesh no matter how hard he tried. It was like trying to stab a figure made of hardened galvanized steel!

"Been looking for you." Bridget used his momentary confusion to toss her attacker over her head, but he wasn't going down without a piece of her. He kicked out her leg and pulled Bridget down under him reaching for the top of her sweat pants. She countered his attempted rape reaching out and punching him to the chest and allowing her legs in the air to continue their flight over her attacker until she was standing once more. She spun round to her opponent unwillingly to give up. He charged at her again trying to pin her to the foundation of the bridge behind her; waving his knife, he responded desperately to take out his demons upon her young innocent flesh. Before him, Bridget levitated over his head with the effortless nimbleness of an aerobic spirit and extended her leg into his back, turning him from antagonist to victim with one movement. The breath knocked from his body, the obscured male in the hood and shorts skirted and stumbled to his feet trying to make his getaway. This one was not worth the effort. He charged up the path toward the tunnel and froze when the blonde he attacked dropped down before him on the far end.

How many more of her was there? He turned to dash round the way he came and felt the rush of air dashing up over him. Something knocked him to his feet again and his head bounced off the edge of the tunnel opening. Skidding to a stop, he rotated around once as the blonde girl came up over him and grabbed him by his sweatshirt. Umpteen girls through his life and he finally met one who couldn't be killed or tired out. She was going to teach him a lesson here. Refusing to be overwhelmed, the career rapist grabbed at her neck and tried choking her as hard as he could, but it was like trying to squeeze a steel pipe! What kind of girl was this? Bridget grabbed him by the front drawstrings of his pants and lifted him up off his feet. When her playmate looked again, he realized he was no longer on the ground. They were both slowly rising ten feet into the air!!

What kind of girl had he attacked?

A few minutes later, traffic was blocked along Mississippi Avenue in Denver. The local rescue squad had been called as police officers stood outside their Mississippi Precinct and looked up to the cell phone tower across the street. Someone had heard the figure screaming his head off from the tower. His underwear had been pulled up tight through the seat of his pants and secured to the tower. Pedestrians and by-standers wanted to know how he got up there. When they finally dragged him down, they found tattooed to his chest a message:

"Deliver to Captain Ed O'Neil, 38th Precinct, New York City."


	22. Chapter 22

"Look, Peggy…" In New York's 38th Precinct, Captain O'Neil argued with his wife through the phone. "I wasn't playing cards with Charlie Marshall. We were on a stake-out on the pier." The door to his confused and disorganized office rapped and parted open to the skinny and blonde figure of Lt. Adam Savage in uniform. The first thing Savage noticed was the outdated children's artwork of their father and the sign of "Bless This Mess." Old cases mixed with misplaced files and lunch receipts covered the captain's desk.

"Captain," Lt. Adam Savage looked across to him. "It's over."

"What's over?" O'Neil hung up his phone wishing his wife had a hobby. "My career, your career, you got to be specific."

"The Central Park slayer…" Norman looked back at him. "Denver police just picked up a guy who they've tied to three murders out there. His DNA matches our guy in CODIS…" He flipped the file round to his captain. "Robert Michael Mitchell, a drifter… He once worked as a taxi driver here. Denver police found him hanging by his underwear in their city." He paused a second. "Looks like your girl came through."

O'Neil looked over the file with the faxed DNA report and rubbed his mouth trying to think about what he should be feeling. A tear dropped from his face thinking about how long it took to get this guy. Mitchell looked like a clean cut guy, the sort he might have allowed to date his daughter, but realizing that this guy had escaped to Colorado and killed more girls because he couldn't stop him here in Manhattan left him with soul-searching questions.

"No…" O'Neil coughed back on his emotions trying be more of a stereotypical gumshoe. "It ain't over. It ain't over till mister put-them-in-the-grave is doing life in prison. Now, we start the extradition."

In Detroit, Kerry returned home in a reflective state thinking about her sister, her dream and all the accusations she had been swimming through for the last three to four months. She was so sure that it was Bridget impersonating this fictional comic book character to the world. Wondering if she was ever going to prove it to herself, she reflected first about her failed attempts to bust her. Somehow, someway, that formerly narcissistic and materialistic blonde was keeping her dual identities a secret from her own family and successively doing it as well. Her performance last night was worthy of an Oscar... an Academy Award perhaps. Kyle had no memory of the girl who had saved him even resembling Bridget. Could he have been hypnotized? Why not? If Bridget could fly, lift train cars and traverse at the speed of light, hypnotism was certainly possible. How about clairvoyance? She had an uncanny knack of knowing when to appear and read events from home from a distance; she had to be aware of them. Might as well toss in possible cloaking powers. No one was going to get another picture of her close up. She was spinning her wheels trying to get Bridget to confess. Why was she so insistent about keeping them a secret from her own sister? From their parents, of course, from their brother, naturally, but from her?… They had once shared everything. Could Bridget be out-growing her?

Entering her home, Kerry heard her father typing away at the computer and acknowledged a response from him. Inaudibly expressing a greeting back, she continued on her path through the house and then up the staircase by the front door up to her bedroom in the back of the house. Her shoulder a bit over laden, she pulled off her book bag looking to her sister with strained recognition. Bridget was stretched out on her back with a copy of _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ perched on her chest as she read it. Upon sight of her sister, Bridget rolled over to her left side with her back to her sister in cold annoyance. Kerry sighed at the display of strained tension between them.

"I brought your homework from school." Kerry casually announced. "Mrs. Sagal wanted me to remind you that you have a test coming up."

Bridget didn't respond or acknowledge her.

"Steve asked me how you were feeling." Kerry tried to get Bridget to open up. "He wants to know if you want to go out with him anytime again. He says he can't stop thinking about you." She paused trying to think of something else to say. "He says thank you for the caved-in bullet. He turned it into a decoration for his rear view mirror."

Bridget pretended she was alone in the room. She licked her finger to turn the page of the book.

"Kyle asked me out."

Bridget looked up to her reflection in the vanity across from her bed. She noticed Kerry in the reflection and continued reading.

"You can't shut me out like this." Kerry continued. "Bridget, it was never about the tuition. I'm so proud of you for winning it; your story was…" She paused realizing what she was thinking. "Pedantic, disturbing and colored with pseudo-lesbian undertones… but it was also Gothic, scary, thematic and brooding. Once I started reading it, I couldn't stop. That's what a good short story should be about."

Bridget didn't make a noise. The page of her book scratched across the previous page as she turned to the next chapter.

"Bridget…" Kerry realized her sister was making her suffer on purpose. "We once told each other everything. We never kept any secrets. This was big, beyond big, and you never told me about it. I wanted to know why you weren't being honest with me. Please… why won't you open up to me? Why are you keeping this a secret from me? Why won't you just tell me the truth? Why are you doing this to me?!"

Bridget rolled her eyes trying to read her library book.

"Where are you hiding that costume?!" Kerry snapped.

Sticking her library card in her place, Bridget slammed the book on her nightstand and swung her feet to the floor. Standing up in her shorts and tank top, she silently tramped out of the room around her sister and down the hall for the kitchen. A tear dropping down her face, Kerry realized again she had let her anger get the worst of her again and kicked the wall of her room. Angry with herself, she shook her head confusingly and lashed out at her sister's belongings, flipping over the mattress and then grabbing and tossing everything out from underneath. Multiple shoes, a diary, secret love letters, forgotten unsigned report cards went flying as Kerry next attacked the closet pulling out everything on hangers and feeling around for hidden doors and compartments. Where was it? It had to be somewhere! She was not wearing it all the time! Her rage and emotion building and feeding off each other, she turned to Bridget's nightstand and pulled the drawers out, dumping and shaking them empty. She violated her sister's privacy with tears streaming down her face, gritting her teeth together and exposed every possible or forgotten secret her sister could have. The whole time she was doing so, she herself was slipping deeper and deeper into despair.


	23. Chapter 23

The party for the new investor was being held at the local Lion's Club Banquet Hall near Sterling Heights. The top and favored employees of the Detroit Tribune were invited with their families, the regular as well as the prior former investors were in attendance with honored Detroit dignitaries and celebrities, ranging from successful politicians, lawyers, doctors and businessmen and local actors like Jack Waagner. He had appeared once on the _Bold and The Beautiful_ daytime drama and even a brief appearance on _CSI_ as a body, but he was most well known in the theatre and a brief liaison with actress Heather Locklear. Nearly every man was garbed in his best suit or tux while the ladies garbed in their best display of the fashion of the day, a motley menagerie of creative color and style or simple taste. Standing in the foyer at the top of marble stairs, publisher and owner Harry Winkler greeted and honored all his guests with a glass of chardonnay in his hand and his Editor Nick Sharp by his side playing the pompous sidekick to his annoyed straight man. Almost everyone who walked past Harry commented he had lost weight since he had given up smoking.

"You tell Tommy that if he embarrasses me or the paper in front of Mrs. Kent that he is fired." Harry turned to Nick between greeting guests.

"Way ahead of you…" Nick sipped a cocktail.

"I don't care how good a writer he is…" Harry continued. "He's getting to be a major embarrassment. He's always sucking up to the female investors." Harry beamed and shined to Larry Kline, his entertainment editor, and his wife, Cindy. "I'm this close to putting Paul back in charge of sports."

"Is it Mrs. Kent or Miss Kent?" Nick asked in his deep baritone voice.

"I have no idea." Harry brushed his graying dark hair back. "I haven't even met her. No one knows who the heck she is. I can't find any info on her. It's as if she came out of nowhere, but she's already worth almost two million dollars, and from what I hear from her accountant, quite young, maybe twenty-five or thirty."

"I wonder if she's single." Nick asked out loud.

"I didn't hear that. Please tell me I didn't hear that." Harry sipped his chardonnay again. "Your job isn't exactly safe either. You can be replaced too you know…."

"But Uncle Harry…"

"You and your mother…" Harry mumbled and tugged at the collar of his tux as if he was preparing to do stand-up. "A small fortune sending you to college and I got to give you a job… geest!" He panned around and looked back upon Paul Hennessey and his family. It was a good-looking family to be attending his gala banquet for the new investor. Cate was looking extraordinary; enough that she didn't look at all as a working mother from the hospital. Her long white dress was simple and grand; her hair styled up off her shoulders. Trussed up in a tuxedo, Paul exchanged a few nervous words then prodded Rory in a smaller tuxedo ahead to shake Harry's hand. On her father's orders to behave herself, Kerry tried to shine and play the role of the happy family. Her blue dress complimented her hair, but it was not as daring as her mother's off the shoulder gown or Bridget's strapless black dress. Seemingly trying to hide in back as if she wanted to escape, Bridget tossed her long blonde locks back with a twist of her head and reacted uncomfortably in these regal settings. Harry gave Cate a peck to the cheek as Paul grinned ear-to-ear to have his entire family with him.

"Paul, you got a good-looking family here." Harry continued on. "Cate, you look beautiful, the girls are growing up to be lovely young ladies and Rory, I hope you are going to follow your father and sisters into writing…"

"God, no!" He got jabbed in the back by his father for that frank comment.

"Hey, Pauley, I appreciate honesty…" Harry patted Paul on the back then noticed Bridget hiding in the shadows. "Well, well, well… Mrs. Winner of the Detroit Tribune 2005 Scholarship… Your family must be very proud of you, Bridget. How you keeping yourself, young lady?"

"Oh…" Bridget forced a nervous grin. "Keeping busy…"

Kerry made a snide sarcastic sound as her mother poked her silently in the back.

"Well, why don't you folks make your way into the ballroom and help yourself to the buffet?" Harry gestured on-ward down the hall. "We'll get things started as soon as our guest of honor arrives."

"Oh… she's probably here already…" Bridget looked around as her mother and brother extended glances upon her. Cate wondered about that comment and looked away shaking it off and prodded her kids onward. Paul stayed behind a few minutes behind to try and pitch new ideas to Harry while Cate escorted her children into the heart of the building. The extended structure was practically dedicated to opulence, indulgence and avarice. It was once a vast mansion, home to the Collins family from 1930s Detroit, but the Great Depression had hit them hard and they sold their former residence. In the 1950s, Harry's father purchased it as the local Lion's Club for a meeting place of Detroit's top businessmen, but along the line, it became a private club for the rich and elite. Surrounded by well-kept grounds and gardens adjacent to the golf course, the Federal-style structure was made much more grand over the years with parquet floors, polished mahogany furnishings and a splendid crystal chandelier looming over the ballroom. Kerry immediately wanted to start spouting with the news that all this money and space could be directed to helping the unfortunate instead of contributing to excess, but for the sake of her parents, she bit her tongue and buried her political views for the sake of her parents. Rory meanwhile looked up to the domed ceiling and curved staircases and wanted to go exploring and searching for secret passageways, but there were people everywhere. Groups and throngs of people standing and talking or sitting isolated in chairs or on benches trying to look involved. Bridget gazed round with her hand to her ear as if she was studying her surroundings. Her brother meanwhile saw the free shrimp and shot forward to do his killer whale impression. Kerry rolled her eyes hoping she wouldn't be embarrassed and turned back to Bridget with the huge hair, slight dress and awkward silence.

"Bridget, if something comes up, I think I saw an antique phone booth in the lobby." She cracked out loud to her. "I think it's large enough for you to change in."

"Stand up straight, Kerry, let everyone see you... Oops!" She mused on her sister's height.

"Stop it, stop it!!" Cate heard the sniping and turned round screaming at a subdued whisper. "If you girls ruin or embarrass your father with this fighting, I will make the rest of your lives miserable, do you hear me?!"

Neither of her girls acknowledged the fighting. This was going to be a very interesting evening. The blonde one looked around at the mixture of adults, peers and kids and sighed trying to reach for a glass of champagne, but her mother shooed her hand from it and took a glass for herself. She directed her daughters to the fruit punch close to where Rory had started devouring shrimp and deviled eggs. It was going to be a race between Rory engorging himself and fighting daughters trying to embarrass their mother before Detroit high society. Bridget acknowledged Kyle and his father nervously as Nick Sharp turned round and noticed her in return.

"So, Bridget…" Nick looked upon the blonde and teenage Hennessey daughter stepping back away from her family. "Are you and my daughter going to have a problem here tonight?" His mind flashed back on disturbances between them from school.

"Oh, is Jenna here too?" Bridget looked around half-heartedly through the palatial architecture and smattering of people. "I don't have a problem with her, but I will defend myself if attacked."

"Bridget…" Cate gave her daughter a look. She did not want to pull those fighting girls away from each other tonight and especially not here.

"Whatever…" Bridget looked from her mother to Jenna's father. "I'm going to the powder room." She turned away hoping to not run into Jenna. God help her if she did, but she had other problems tonight. She was here as herself for now, she was expected as another character here plus she was still on alert for anything that happened around her. Last thing she needed tonight was for a big Kryptonian symbol to project itself up into the night sky. Beyond an alcove off the grand hall, Bridget passed through a small sitting room of women adjusting themselves and gossipping on who wore what and entered a converted restroom from a former bathroom. She invaded the room quickly assessing it of people. She looked under the stalls, eyed the plate glass window in back and pretended to notice the older women talking at the mirrors. It was clean and sterile like the restrooms of church and coldly impersonal as a functioning ladies restroom. She casually glided up to the sink and turned on both the silver pewter hot and cold water taps to swirl water around into filling the ceramic sink. A few more gossiping rumors and innuendoes from the voices around her, and the two housewives were out to join their significant others. Gazing upon the mirror, Bridget pulled her long blonde locks back and pressed them to the back of her head, a clip snagged secretly to her evening dress was used to pin it back. She reached next to a secret pocket in the eaves of the back of her long skirt and pulled out a brunette wig of short hair. She tightly pulled that on and adjusted it to conceal her natural blonde hair. It was the same type of wig used by the motion picture industry. Reportedly, Teri Hatcher wore the same kind of wig at Hollywood galas for that blacker than black hair. Waving her hands into the water, Bridget's heightened senses detected footsteps encroaching on the restroom, and she bent over to rinse off her face and add a few years...

"I am settling this for the last time!" Cate bickered with her daughter. "Kerry, you trashed your sister's belongings! You two have to learn to live together!" She turned from Kerry to her other daughter. "Bridget, I want you two…"

The woman in the black evening dress wasn't Bridget… at least, not anymore. She was a bit older with shoulder-length black hair and two piercing azure blue eyes. Her strapless dress was the same as the younger girl, but then several ladies tonight had long dark strapless evening dresses. Cate stepped back out of embarrassment.

"I'm sorry, I thought you was my daughter." Cate excused herself. Kerry leaned in a bit looking at this person.

"No problem." Bridget's voice came from this mature older lady. Sorry to be doing this, she listened to her mother calling her name and purposely ignored it to step out into the sitting room. Unaware if this was going to work or not or how long it could last, the former young beauty had merely willed herself a few more years or more into her future self. This was only going to last a little while, hopefully just long enough to make a public appearances as Linda Kent then vanish again back into rumor and gossip. She stopped and paused before a polished bronze mirror.

"I'm still hot." She looked at herself at thirty years old with short black hair. She grinned and primped herself a bit by pulling her dress up under her bosom then realized something else. She stepped closer to the reflection and noticed something else. "Oh god, I do look like Reese Witherspoon!!" She finally realized it herself. Stepping back from her new adult image, she turned to meet her guests in her honor then caught distant voices in her ear that made her step back. Harry Winkler had been pacing back and forth at the doors for his guest of honor. The security hired by his caterers expressed a bit of news.

"Sorry, Mr. Winkler, but no one named Linda Kent arrived through the doors." The bald Michael Chiklis-look-alike replied.

"She didn't arrive?" Harry clutched his heart and began to fret. "I've got over three hundred people here to meet her. She's the guest of honor!!" He spoke in a nervous shaky voice and reached for his cell phone. "I'm calling her accountant. Please, god, I hope she told her about the party otherwise I've got all these people here for nothing and I'm no good at improvisation. No one wants to hear my Barry Zuckerhorn impression."

A gust of wind plowed past the publisher and his employee. It partially spun Harry around and nearly knocked over his security.

"Was that a breeze?" Harry looked round. "Why was there a breeze in my club? It ain't haunted." He started checking his phone numbers and noticed out the corner of his eyes an enchanting presence coming up the stairs to the front landing and entering the banquet hall. Tall, slight of frame and as shapely as a young model, the incredible beauty tilted her head back with regal bearing. Her rich blue eyes sparkled against the lights piercing the darkness of the evening. A shapely leg glided across the parquet floor as her alabaster shoulders swayed carrying her godly frame into the realm of mortals.

"Mr. Winkler?" Bridget was already shaping a third identity by slowing her voice to a breathy Marilyn Monroe tone and mustering a faint British accent. "Linda Kent… Sorry, I'm late, but I've never been to Detroit before." She raised her arm to meet him. She had seen it done in a movie.

"Mrs. Kent…" Harry shined enchanted upon her movie-star looks and took her arm to escort her. "It is a grand honor to meet you in person, and to have you join me in my club. I never pictured you as being so young."

"Oh, I'm younger than I look…" Bridget's mind in the guise of Linda Kent disguised the truth in a riddle.

"If you don't mind me asking…" Harry guided her through the foyer to the ballroom. "How did you start your fortune?"

"Tinkering in the stock market…" The young girl pretending to be mature once more confessed the obvious truth. "You could say I'm just a smidge psychic…" She turned the truth into a covert joke. Harry chuckled at the reference and took his arm under his own.

"I just want to thank you for the stocks and for the chance of meeting you." He made small talk while escorting her into the party. "You know, I can't seem to find anything about you anywhere. It's as if you've dropped down out of nowhere. I would love it if we could do a story about you."

"There's not much to tell." Bridget quickly started improvising as she checked her look in a passing mirror. "I've been living off the grid for years. Up until my dabbling in the stock market, I really didn't have the means to do or have anything." She gave a simplified version of the truth. As she and her father's publisher entered the main hall from the front foyer, she was met upon by other guests who turned to notice her. A few others stopped to acknowledge her and take her hand briefly to say hello. Cate was sipping a bit of wine grateful to be out in the real world away from home and the hospital. Paul was talking to Nick when the taller man looked over and dropped his jaw at the woman on his uncle's arm. Cate turned her head and Paul turned around entirely to see who everyone was looking at behind him. Tommy started coming out and Harry veered Linda Kent away from him toward his editor and former sports writer. Cate lightly lowered her head wondering why this woman seemed familiar. Wasn't she… Wasn't she the woman from the restroom? And there was something else... somthing else like... didn't she know this girl?

"Mrs. Kent," Harry turned aristocratically cordial. "Allow me to introduce Nick Sharp, my editor, and Paul Hennessy, one of my columnists, and his lovely wife, Cate."

"It is an honor to meet you." Nick reached to take her hand. "Let me introduce you to my daughter, Jenna, and my wife…"

"Mr. Hennessy…" Linda snubbed Nick and Jenna and turned to Paul. "I love your column. I've been reading it religiously since I came to Detroit. I loved the one about how there's a mysterious gremlin in every house that makes things vanish."

"You did!" Paul grinned ear-to-ear and lorded this attention from the new investor over Nick. "Actually, we call him Rory… would you like to meet him?"

"Excuse me…" Cate held her glass of wine aloft in one hand as she took Linda's hand to greet her with her right hand. "But… you look so familiar… have we met before?"

"Well…" Still molding a British accent, Linda looked Jenna up and down as if judging her. "A lot of people say I look like that American actress Reese Witherspoon."

"You look so much like her!" Jenna tried to speak up.

"I wasn't talking to you." Linda looked the girl over and turned back to her parents. Please don't let them recognize her!

"Mrs. Kent…" Paul gestured to his kids to come over and noticed shrimp and crab puffs stuffed into Rory's packets. Rolling his eyes at that, he moved to introduce his daughters first. "I'd like to introduce my daughter, Kerry..." Kerry shined for once as Paul looked around confusingly and moved on to the boy. "My son, Rory…." He looked around for Bridget then turned to Cate. "Where's Bridget?" He whispered to his wife.

"She's been hiding from me all night." Cate whispered back to Paul as Linda Kent teased with her left earring.

"Oh, is that another daughter…" Her faux accent dancing on her words, Linda refused to play more than two characters tonight. "I think I saw a young girl talking on a cell phone in the lobby area. I mean, these girls and their cell phones… they live by them as if they were oxygen. You'd think her parents would teach her better." She lifted a glass of wine to her lips.

"Oh, it couldn't be my daughter!" Paul immediately dissuaded that thought. "She hates talking on a cell phone!"

"Yeah, she doesn't even have one!" Cate tried covering up for herself. Linda seemingly mused to herself watching her father and mother talk about her in front of her. What a wonder chance to see how they talked about her and use it against them. Paul took Cate aside and gave her a quick brief message concealed in a whisper.

"Lose Bridget!!!"

Cate spun round and graciously began excusing herself to the judging eyes of modern American aristocracy. Once having made her image to these people, she then quickly dashed to prevent her daughter from making hers. Linda Kent shined a covert grin while stealing a look at her then turned to her father and Mr. Winkler.

"Excuse me, I just must freshen up." She told them and glided as a princess away to the powder room. Harry and Paul eyed her shape and form in unison. The publisher pictured himself taking her as his next wife, and Paul eyed her body and wishing himself years younger.

"Isn't she a looker?" Harry loved her legs and the shape of her dress around her bodice.

"She sure is." Nick added, his uncle swatting him for the comment.

"Yeah…" Paul confessed. "I don't know why… but she reminds me a bit of Bridget."

"I don't think so." Jenna Sharp sniped out loud and was poked by her father.

Stepping away back through the gathering, Cate lightly beamed and cordially greeted people around her as she slowly returned to the lobby to find her errant daughter. She waved pleasantly to Harry's wife and someone else who knew her and stepped into the lobby looking for her firstborn blonde and formerly vacuous daughter. The long hall stretched from the circular grand hall to the front entryway. The club's smoking room was to one side and the former Collins parlor was used in modern years as a meeting hall. Potted plants, statues of Greek gods and portraits of local historical figures adorned the hall with its heavily ornate and baroque furnishings. Cate looked to the antique wood phone booth with the modern pay phone and peeked into the former study. A gale of air curved along the back of bare back and she turned round from the sensation. The once empty phone booth now had a person in it. She gasped catching her breath and walked up to it with the gait of a frustrated mother. She peeked inside through a crack in the glass door.

"Bridget?"

"Mom, I got to take this." Blonde and young again, Bridget held up her cell phone.

"Bridget, honey…" Cate started looking for excuses. "Look, I'm stressed out a bit tonight as it is, and well, I know you don't mean it, but I can't take the chance of you and Kerry starting a fight here tonight. I want you to be the more mature one and head on home." She reached to her purse to give her daughter money for a taxi.

"You're sending me home?" Bridget realized she was getting just what she wanted. She did not want to be racing between two roles tonight and her mother was unwittingly helping her.

"Yes…" Cate confessed. "But first I want you to make an appearance and meet Mrs. Kent."

"What?!" Bridget might have been fast, but even she could not be two people at once! Her mind started racing. "Uh, okay, it's not like she could possibly be that witch with the split ends wearing the same dress I'm wearing…"

"On second thought…." Cate willed her daughter around and hastened with her back to the entrance. "The least damage is found by the shortest path. You just head on home, and we'll see you by ten."

"Okay…" Bridget loved this ability to manipulating people by using their own fears against them. She kissed her mother, pulled her rap up over her shoulders and then stopped and paused before the doorman holding the door for her. A burglar alarm was going off somewhere. She had a third person to be tonight.

"This night is going to kill me!" She hissed under breath and charged down the steps for her mother's minivan parked on the property.

"Did you fix our problem?" Paul noticed his lovely wife returning to the banquet.

"All fixed…" Cate beamed and looked around. "Where's Mrs. Kent?"

"She had to go to the powder room." Harry reflected waiting on her as he rocked himself back and forth and checked on her. "Cate, she's been a few minutes in there. Since you're a nurse, could you see if she's alright?"

"Yeah, sure…" Cate started striding through the guests once more then stopped and looked to the banquet tables. Kerry and Kyle had found each other and were standing intimately talking and ridiculing high society. Rory had stopped briefly from gorging on the free shrimp and oysters and had picked up a crystal glass from a tray to sample for himself. Cate directed Paul to handle that without embarrassing his daughter. Turning back to the direction of the bathrooms, her feet turned for the powder room again. As her hand reached for the door, there was a gust of wind through the room and everyone looked around the great hall then up to the chandelier lightly swaying. From the other side of the room, Linda Kent started strolling out from opposing corridor.

"Mrs. Kent…" Kyle's father spun round to greet her. "Let me introduce myself, Tommy Brady, the newspaper's sports editor." His eyes gravitated once then again to her cleavage. "I just want to say how good it is to meet you, and to have you as part of the Detroit Tribune's little family." Across the room, Harry and Nick placed their hands to their foreheads in disbelief at the same time. Tommy was smooching up with the new hot female investor!!! "I hope we can see… I mean, get a lot of support from you." Tommy checked out her breasts again.

"Can I get you fired?" Bridget perfected her British accent again.

"Probably."

"I've only known you a minute and I already don't like you." She showed she could take care of herself and strolled forward with Tommy choking on his breath in shock and his wife patting him on the back. Once more appearing as this necessary third person, the person everyone believed to be Linda Kent glided to the banquet table and took a piece of lobster to raise to her lips. Across from her on the other side of the table, Rory was peeking down the front of her dress and grinning. It may have been another appearance, but Bridget's mind was still there, and it was screaming. On her right, Kerry was looking her over as well.

"My sister is wearing the same dress." She announced.

"I'm sure she looks much nicer in her copy." The British voice of Linda Kent tried to be gracious.

"According to her…" Kerry rolled her eyes away. Linda reacted as if she had been offended. This was a wonderful chance to see herself from her sister's eyes.

"You look a bit like my sister." Linda once again twisted the truth into another scenario. From afar, Cate and Paul shined to see their daughter striking a friendship with the beautiful heiress. "We spent much of our lives fighting, but no matter what, we always loved each other."

"I love my sister too." Kerry confessed. "But she makes it so hard. She got this secret she just won't share with me."

"Maybe…" Linda looked upon Kerry with a trustful gaze. "She wants too, but she's not allowed to. Have you tried seeing it from her point of view?"

"Not really…" Kerry paused as she turned to the tinkling noise of Harry Winkler tapping a wine glass with a serving spoon. The graying publisher had strided out to the center of the room to attract everyone's attention.

"Ladies and gentlemen…" He spoke in his public voice. "On behalf of the Detroit Tribune and all my affiliates, I want to introduce Mrs. Linda Kent to the United States and our little family. May all her ventures be successful, and good prosperity upon us all." There was a collective toast from the room and Linda found herself at the center of attention. Everyone turned and honored her and she herself was offered a glass of wine. She honored her hosts back and lifted her glass to acknowledge the recognition. They waited a second for her as she took a sip then cheered her in return. Linda made a passing glance to Kerry then to Kyle just before more people came passing by to meet her. Harry sipped his drink and placed his hand on Paul.

"Tommy be damned…" He spoke to his favorite writer. "Paul, Mrs. Kent loves your family. I notice Bridget couldn't stay, but it doesn't matter. If you want to be sports editor again, it's yours, all you got to do is ask!"

"Do you mean that?!" Paul accepted with a rousing handshake with his favorite boss then turned and hugged his wife. Cate cheered for him and jumped up kissing him. She couldn't place her finger on it, but there was something about Linda Kent that gravitated to her family. Could they be distantly related? What was it that seemed so familiar about her? She partially resembled Dr. Masterson at the hospital, but there was something else… that sort of presence that Bridget possessed as well. This was going to drive her nuts.

Linda shook another hand and shined to her new friends, but her attention was distracted to something else invading her senses from the form of police radio broadcasts about a reckless driver on the interstate. An annoyed grunt from her lips, she reverted again to friendly and cheerful briefly then glided herself to head toward her parents and Harry Winkler. She excused herself by revealing her cell phone to them and pointing out to the meeting hall for privacy. Cate recognized that cell phone. Bridget had one just like it. Could that mean something?

"Boy, she's a hard person to stay pinned." Harry noticed. "Always dashing off."

"Probably how she makes her fortune." Paul guessed.

Stuffing free food into the limited pockets of his jacket, Rory stuffed another napkin full of shrimp into his pants pocket and several oysters into his other pocket. The caterer eyed him disgustedly, and Rory turned to the window to conceal his booty. As he tried to get a section of trout into his pants pocket, Rory noticed Mrs. Kent dashing down the outside stairs to the gazebo and garden. She pulled off her black wig to a mane of blonde hair and dashed behind an SUV in the parking lot. Out the other side, a blonde figure sprang up into the air in a red cape flying into the air. His eyes widened in shock realizing what he had seen.

The shrimp in his mouth hit the window and bounced to the floor!

"Kerry!" He forgot about stealing free seafood and pulled Kerry from Kyle to the window. He mumbled something confused and incoherent to his sister's ear, and somehow, someway, she understood. A second later, she responded.

"What?!!"

"I saw her!" Rory pointed to the gardens below. "I saw what I saw what I saw!!!"

"That's impossible!" Kerry dashed to the window for her own look and refused to want to believe it. It was Bridget. It had to be! All this behavior at home couldn't be an act. "It has to be Bridget, it just…" Her conscience started bothering her. "Oh, my god… what have I been doing? I owe Bridget a massive, massive apology!"

Kyle stepped over to appeal to Kerry and get their version of what was going on. Kerry and Rory claimed they had done Bridget wrong, but they didn't go into specifics. They confessed to accusing Bridget of the dual identity thing, but they didn't mention why they had changed their minds. Nick informed Tommy he was going to be covering the obituaries now or nothing at all, and that got a response. He looked to Paul upset and dejected, his jaw dropping open briefly and then the pleading to behave himself again. Larry Kline, the entertainment editor, came over to welcome Paul back to the newspaper where he belonged. Cate held her chest trying to keep calm in the excitement. His mind and soul higher than ever, Paul tilted his head back and cheered once again for Linda Kent. As Cate surveyed Paul's friends congratulating him, his face turned white and his eyes rolled tiredly. He lost the feeling in his legs and he collapsed to the floor. Cate screamed as excitement turned to fear. She rushed to her husband's side.

"Someone call 911!!!"

On Interstate 75, Bridget had stopped four lanes of traffic with a tractor-trailer. Striding past a flipped over corvette with its intoxicated driver pinned underneath, she noticed the police sirens coming and ascended to the sky, her red cape flapping and snapping with the luster of a massive set of wings. Upon turning to the direction back to the Lion's Club, the 911-Call resonated in her head and she streaked back to the former Collins mansion. What she saw took her aback. Hovering two hundred feet into the air, she looked down below her and noticed a crowd of men carrying the unconscious form of her father on their shoulders to the waiting ambulance. His face was white, his body limp. Her mother's voice was screaming into the night. Harry Winkler and Nick Sharp led a crowd of fifteen men supporting the mortal body of Paul Hennessey to the arriving paramedics…


	24. Chapter 24

A few people inhabited the hospital waiting room. The blue-gray floor was tracked with worried shoeprints; the view beyond the pale blue walls was growing somber. A faint rain had begun falling as Rory finished off the hors d'oeuvres from the napkins in his pockets. His mother had to be given a tranquilizer by her peers; that meant he was in the custody of Kerry and Kyle. Kyle sat restlessly trying to figure out what to do besides filling the coke machine with quarters for drinks. Kerry paced back and forth trying to call her sister on her cell phone but to no avail. Where was she? Had the blonde one gone shopping or on a date? She wanted to apologize for all the grief she had given her... and she wanted to get her to the hospital to tell her that that their dad had collapsed. She called the house again then her cell phone, growing even more frustrated before throwing her own cell phone to the floor and lowering her face into her hands crying. Their father was possibly dying and Bridget could not be found! Tommy Brady sat nearby with his head in his hands. He was holding his head in his hands distraught and ripping himself up for all the derision he had given Paul over the years. He wanted to continue being the sports writer, but not like this. Years of karma were catching up with him. He always thought of Paul as his friend, but he had never shown it or even told him, and now, it might be too late. Rory rose worriedly and wandered to the soda machine in the alcove near the entrance of the waiting room. He was tired of watching the rain outside and the surging creek off the parking lot. As he searched his tux pockets for change, Kyle whirled round with a dollar and fed it in for him. Behind them, Harry had returned to them with the news. Kerry felt his presence and jumped up trying to cover her emotions.

"What's happening? Where's my mom?"

"Bridget isn't here yet?" Paul's boss reacted not seeing Paul's oldest daughter present in the waiting room.

"I can't find her."

"Okay," Harry placed his arm around her to assure her in her sister's absence. "Kerry, your mom is all right. She's surrounded by her friends from the nursing staff. On the other hand, your father is in surgery with surgeons trying to replace his aortic valve." He paused taking a breath and tears coming from his eyes. "Last month, he was diagnosed with a weakened aortic valve near his heart; he was going in for surgery next week."

"Why weren't we told about this?!" Kerry was dumb-founded and shocked. She looked to Rory then back to Harry.

"I understand your parents didn't want to worry you about it." Harry was choking on tears and emotion. "They are trying to keep his heart beating that he can get the surgery now, but honey…" He choked again trying to stay strong. It was too hard. Way too hard. He loved Paul like a son and protege from the moment he hired him at the newspaper. "Your father is strong… he's such… he's such a good guy. You got to stay positive. You won't lose him…"

"What kind of chance does he have?" Rory looked up with tears welling in his eyes.

"You won't lose him…" Harry repeated himself. "You have to get your sister here!"

In another room of the hospital, sitting alone in the observatory above the surgery room, Bridget watched from shadowy heights as doctors and surgeons worked on her father. Nurses and orderlies swarmed around him. The anesthesiologist kept him breathing. Bridget had made a weak attempt to cover her costume by pulling stolen hospital scrubs over her costume; she listened and eavesdropped on their pessimistic hopes for success. Her father's blood pressure had fallen once; they were pouring whole blood into him as fast as they got it. Her tear-soaked eyes darted from her father's pulse rate to his belabored breathing. How long could they keep his heart beating if it was losing blood? If it weren't for her godly gifts, Bridget would be out-stretched like her mother, out cold from the sad reality of the world.

"You're not supposed to be in here." A voice calmly stated. It was from an older black man entering into the observation room. He was dressed as a custodian, but he wasn't much of an intimidating figure. He was a tall and proud figure with grandfatherly eyes and silver hair with faint stubble of beard on his chin. More welcoming than intrusive, he set his broom aside and casually strolled down the steps down near Bridget. She looked up to him once then back to the surgery.

"Your father is a very special man." He came down and posed by Bridget with his broom held furtively before him. "He has this way of lighting people up when he enters a room. In many ways, you're just like him. You have a way of shining into the lives of others yourself."

"I don't care about myself right now." Bridget's voice cracked. "I wasn't there to help him because…"

"You were off helping someone else." The janitor added. "I see and hear the same thing over and over. People embarrassed because they feel they hadn't done enough. Bridget, don't be ashamed of yourself because you weren't there. You're only human. I understand the limits of human beings better than you think. The trick is not grieving over what you can do, but being happy for what you have done. A person is measured by their deeds, not by how much they have or how they look, but then... I get the feeling you've already figured that out."

"I just want my dad back." Bridget looked away wiping tears from her eyes. Her lips tried mouthing her next words. "I'd do anything for him."

"He knows that."

"Who are you?" Bridget looked back at this man. She thought she'd seen him in a movie or something. "Do you know my father? How did you know my..."

"Oh, I'm just the custodian." The enigmatic figure turned again and took his broom. "I take care of what has to be done."

Bridget's head turned back to her father and noticed the doctors and surgeons wheeling her father out of the operating room. Surgeon Mark Sloane and Doctor John Dorian exchanged worried glances as they escorted Paul Hennessy into critical observation hoping and praying for the best and that maybe God heard their prayers. Checking his devices and machines reading his biorhythms, Sloane inquired about the family and John lead the way. The wife was under deep medication after her shock of watching her husband collapse and get carried out on the shoulders of his friends; she had been placed into deep sleep in a room of the hospital. The life of Paul Hennessy was in the hands of God or fate now. Nurse Marcy Walker signed on Paul's admission and turned the lamp on in his cold and dark hospital room. She noticed that mist outside had graduated into a full rain. It was after midnight now.

Although Marcy had left the room, she had not left it empty. A surge of air had passed her as she left Paul in post-op, and behind her, Bridget looked to the door closing on the strands of light filling in and found herself in darkness except for the one light. Alone with her father's body, she stood over him and took his hand. It took both of hers to cover it. She looked at him with deeper respect than ever before and sniffed slightly trying to be there for him.

"I love you, daddy." Her chin trembled a bit. A tear traced the shape of her face. "If it is at all possible for me to save you, let me do it now. If I can fly and move the earth, I can heal… I can bring you back. Please don't leave me. I need you." Her chin trembled again and her voice cracked. "I have the power, I have the power to heal you…" She willed him into waking up. She pictured him opening his eyes. Her memories tried turning her fathered into a young man with the vigor of a youth half his age. Once more her eyes welled up, her heart growing heavy. She needed to be by her father! She had to be! The door opened on her.

"Bridget!" Dr. Liz Masterson had stormed the room. "How did you get in here? You can't be in here!"

"Please, I can save him." Bridget looked up to her.

"Honey, I'm sorry, but this section is closed off to non-staff." She snapped her fingers for orderlies and prodded the young girl from her father. "You're going to have to give the scrubs back too, but I'll let you wear them for now."

"Don't take me from him!!" Bridget started screaming to see the two hospital workers coming for her. "I can save him!"

Cate heard the screams and woke from her sleep. She sait up in bed, noticed the hospital gown she is and wondered first if she had had another kid, then flashed back on the memory she wanted to forget. Upstairs in the waiting room, Kerry and Rory heard the screams from the floor below and looked to each other in the waiting room in confusion. Who was screaming? The two men came round to lift Bridget up by her shoulders and pull her from her father's side. Screaming hysterically, she reached to her father yelling at the top of her lungs. Her father didn't move. He didn't wake. It hadn't worked. She was going to lose him. Just doing her job, Liz checked Paul's signals, the machines keeping him alive and followed Bridget's screams into the hall.

"Bridget, stop screaming!!" Dr. Masterson told the younger girl. It was then Bridget's personality kicked in with a fury.

"Get them off me!!" Bridget had reached up and flung her human restraints in two different directions. One figure flew over the nurse's station and bounced off another counter. The other orderly sailed ten feet down the hall, cracked the wall with his back and landed on the floor. Striking out against Dr. Masterson, Bridget's fist had instead hit the wall, which now cracked through the plaster and split the hospital down the center, a resonating tremor cracking down to the basement foudation and up to the roof of the five floor structure. Dr. Liz Masterson backed to the other wall, her hand to her chest as she heard the entire residence reeling in half. She remembered what Cate had said and realized it was true!

"Oh my god… oh my god!!" Her head turned in shock to Bridget racing from the scene. The girl sent a security guard flying into the door of an examination room with little effort. She tossed a gurney out of her way by lifting it over her head. Liz shrank to the floor in shock upon realizing the power at this young lady's control. Her eyes widened in shock watching this young woman storming out of the hospital and shattering the entrance doors when they didn't open fast enough. The young blonde beauty charged out into the pouring rain.

From the second floor waiting room, Kerry heard the crash and turned her head to look out the window. Gazing down through the waiting room window to the wet and hazy parking lot, she saw the figure down below her. Was that Bridget? It looked like she was losing it. She kicked a parked car and caved in its driver's side door, sliding the whole vehicle five feet, then turned and hoisted a lost wheelchair over her head and across the block. Kerry could only watch in shock as it cleared the entire block. Near the docks, it fell from the sky, skidded off the edge of a trawler and fell off the side. Watching her sister through the rain, Kerry realized she was the only one watching this. Rory was off to the bathroom. Kyle was feeding quarters to the soda machine and Tommy's dad was still trapped in his own self-pity. She was the only one seeing this! What did this mean? Was she right all along? What about Mrs. Kent? Was there more than one person with powers in this town? Unable to look away, she watched her sister screaming and ripping her scrubs off from over her costume. That costume... she was wearing it! Kerry realized she had been right all along, but did it really matter anymore? She had her sister's secret now even with the rain and her breath on the window keeping her from seeing it clearly, and no one else in the waiting room was even watching. Bridget couldn't even be aware of it. She turned her head back just in time to see her sister spinning round in her angry fit, looking for something to exert her strength and temper on, then rising up into the air. Her hostile banshee scream disturbing everyone in the waiting room and the whole hospital. Kyle had lifted his head and looked to his father wondering what it was. Rory had returned, looked at Kerry and wondered what she was looking at outside in the parking lot outside the emergency exit.

The sky started opening up more as Bridget shot through it. Higher up in the atmosphere, the rain was worse and her presence sent off shockwaves in the form of lightning bolts cracking through her body with no effect. Her temper tantrum and fit of hostility was not good for the weather either, dragging it over Lake Erie and toward Northern Ohio. Mist and precipitation pouring over her, the blonde one cursed at everything around her and hissed at the planet itself. If her heart was going to be broken then everyone should feel it! She screamed at the world and dragged her fingernails across the top of a United Airlines flight over Toledo, rattling it enough that passengers whispered in fear and panic about the sound grazing the plane. Ground crew could figure out the mystery of the scratches later in the steel hull. Bridget dodged down to earth with her cape flapping around her once more opening up more rain over Cleveland. Meteorologists and air traffic controllers down on Earth puzzled over the Doppler read-outs from the weather. Pittsburgh was supposed to have clear skies for another few days, but then the sky opened up and they now announced thunderstorms. Bridget screamed at the gods of heaven and earth once more and cracked through the clear skies over Philadelphia before turning toward the air space over New York City. Her voice was piercing the night sky over six states and the North Atlantic seaboard. Her perfect features twisted into a angry sneer, she dipped down long enough to the torch of Lady Liberty above the entrance to New York Harbor and threatened to pound it out of her hand then veered off at the last minute for the empty ocean. Her fists clenched into angry balls of fury, the blonde one now had miles of ocean streaking ahead of her and dark clouds spreading behind her bad disposition. The ley lines crossing over England and former Eire were growing stronger and as she approached them, her speed beginning to increase as she pushed the limits of her powers. A sonic boom cracked the sky as she lifted into the planet's atmosphere, cleaving through the clouds of frozen rain and suspended ice. Approaching sub-orbital velocity, she could see the distant morning sun still at least six hours away. She dodged below once more and split the skies once more with her broken heart and temper fueling her angry conniption. Somewhere above the North Sea, the Royal Air Force picked her out on radar and followed her path into France. The skies over the Eiffel Tower cracked with lightning and Russian sailors in the Adriatic Sea glimpsed the streaking shape over the shores of Greece through the stormy skies. Bridget buzzed the slopes of Mount Olympus once and shot forward up again clenching her teeth looking for something to exert her wrath upon from earth. She stopped over the land over of the Carpathians and unconsciously perceived North. Like the children's story, she streaked toward the North Star next and charged forward until morning with the sunlight of the next day directing her way. Above the former lands of the Vikings and Saxon armies, she screamed her heart out to the stars.

"Where the hell are you?!" She clenched her teeth viciously. Her long hair was dry now, but the edges of her cape had frayed away from friction. Her costume had become tattered, its seams ill-equipped for velocities approaching the speed of light. With her pleated skirt lost somewhere over Switzerland, Bridget looked up to the sunlight breaking through the clouds in just a blue leotard, its Kryptonian symbol worn away by air pressure, and a frayed red cape. Her sleeves hanging loose from her cuffs and costume, her once proud crest nearly worn smooth from her costume, her eyes looked into the rays of the sun breaking through the skies before her. Other shapes flitted through the expanse of atmospheric matter. As the light pierced through, it blinded even Bridget and obscured the humanoid figures flitting around her. Spirit beings in attire both ancient and modern surrounded her at a distance or stood curiously from the golden stairway hidden from her vision. The bright light obscured the top of the vision she was seeing, but the figures surrounding her were much more obvious. They were both physical and ethereal with grand lights around their heads and wispy wings billowing behind them. A few of their peers and cohorts were not as angelic as themselves, but rather beings linked to both heaven and earth. Mulling at the stairs into Elysium, the former teachers of humanity looked down from the heights onto their mortal descendants and children of their worshippers. Foremost among them, Zeus Thunderstriker looked upon Alfadur Odin once, pulled his hand down over his piercing red beard and looked down upon Bridget. An annoyed yet curious mumble came from his lips as immortal met with mortal, a confrontation which had not occurred in over two thousand years since he was asked to withdraw from earth.

"You will only be allowed to call upon the Immortals three times in your lifetime…." He stood among his peers and equals. "Do you really want to waste this gathering upon this matter?"

"I'm not doing it anymore!" Bridget defied the former gods. "Why do I have to save the lives of strangers but not that of my family?" Her body hovered near the firmament of heaven and earth. "You said I could save my father's life!!"

"Once again, Bridget of the Clan Hennessey, you hear what you want to hear." Odin turned his head of snowy white hair down over her. "I believe we told you might be able to save your father from his fate." He closed his eyes and peered upon mental images invading his senses. "Even now, the Norns are weaving the tapestry of your father's life. Even when we were the gods of mankind, we had no power over the whims of fate and destiny. Not even Infinity, the father of your Messiah, can break those humanly bonds."

"I want my father back!" Bridget demanded. "I want him back or else I'm no longer helping another person. Strip me of my powers, I don't care. It's not fair!!"

"Dear Bridget," Garbed in armor of gold and charged with piercing eyes of green, St. Brigid intervened on behalf of the former gods of Eire. "Think of what you're asking!"

"Do you recall the person you once was?" Osiris, the former pharaoh and lord of the Afterlife spoke from above. "You were vain, conceited… you had no knowledge of the world. You had no heart but for what you cared about. Do you really wish to be the person you once was?"

"I want my father." Bridget shed a tear. "It's just… not fair."

"Do you think you were the only one we chose?" Blonde and pure Gabriel of the Holy Host looked down upon these proceedings wondering about the distraction. "You chose to exhibit your godly gifts as you saw fit and we never intervened. We can lose one young girl who chooses to reject her gifts. There are other mortals who would relish the gifts they would receive. That Boston heiress with the selfish heart, the brother of that singer… humanity is full of wasted lives which we can cure of their lack of altruism and avarice."

"If we rend from you of your godly gifts, mortal girl…" The lord of the Immortals looked on Brigid and folded his arms before his broad chest. "We will allow you to keep your memories. You may have your father back and then again you may not, but you forever see the results of your folly. Suffering ever day, deaths that could have been prevented, disasters that could be averted... You will witness all of it and recall you could have prevented it. Humanity does not need our help to destroy itself."

"Bridget…" Another female immortal appealed to her heart. "Reconsider… Mortals are losing more hope every day and plead to both Infinity and creation for help. We are bound from helping mortal man while it is upon themselves to solve their own problems! Do not let despair fill even your soul."

"One life for the souls of many…."

"Death is unfortunate, but hope is eternal."

"Are you truly willing to be the girl you once were?"

"Mankind is on the verge of its own destruction!"

"You and our other children on Midgard have a chance to aspire humanity to higher levels." Odin looked upon her trying to appeal to her heart. "You could live in legend with Hercules, Arthur, Moses and others…"

"It's your choice, Bridget of the Clan Hennessy." Zeus focused his gaze upon her. "The life of your father or the lives of many."


	25. Chapter 25

Paul Hennessey danced into his home. A bag or two of snacks under his arm and a six-liter of soda in the other, he sung the Michigan fight song under breath as he set himself into a familiar place and flicked on the TV through the remote control. The Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers game was going to be starting any moment now. He opened his first bag of chips and dumped them into the bowl before him. He added a bag of corn chips and another bag of another brand.

"Hello, friends," He shined. "It's been a while." He celebrated the end of his special diet and bad-tasting medicine. A recurring doctor's visit was all he had to worry about now. No one knew how he had survived, but his recovery was a lot more than just a miracle. He felt young again, and once again, he had the insatiable appetite and sex drive of a young man, and a sexy wife made it all that much more fun. His wife loved him again too. He had awakened shortly after the unknown girl had stormed the hospital looking for drugs. At least, that was the public story released to the papers for the vandalism and attacks at the hospital. No one was sure who she was, none of the security pictures got her face, but she had put three men in traction and Dr. Masterson took a sabbatical to get herself together after the ordeal. Cheering his home team, Paul looked around his house looking and waiting for the usual family disturbance. There was nothing. Was he the only one here?

"Cate? Kids?" He called them shined happily to the TV. "All alone…" He grinned and giggled like a young kid to have the TV to himself. Finally he thought. Just as he wanted it... all was right with the world...

"Daddy, is that you?" Bridget yelled from upstairs.

"Oh, crap….." Paul whined over his lack of alone time. "Where's your mother?" He called to her up the stairs from before the TV.

"She called to say she'd be working late." Bridget started to come down then distractedly raced back to her room for something. "Kerry's with Kyle."

"And Rory?" Paul inquired during a commercial.

"Who cares about him?!" Bridget yelled down. Paul accepted that answer and munched on some chips. He made a face of annoyance and slid a coaster under his drink in case Cate wandered in unexpectedly. He lifted his glass of soda as the sports commentators came on to discuss the game and heard Bridget stomping down the staircase. He raised his drink to his lips, took a sip of soda and casually glanced to his daughter in the long red cape and short red skirt with the symbol across her chest and spewed soda from his mouth across the table.

"Bridget!!!" He stood in shock! "What… How… Why… What… are you wearing?!"

"Daddy, I'm going to work." The blonde one answered matter-of-factly.

"Work???" He refused to believe it. "You mean you've… you're that…. This whole time!!!" His hand reached to his heart.

"Well, duh…" Brigid sipped milk from the jug in the refrigerator and unfurled a long ten-foot list from her cape. "Let's see, I've got a wrecked train, cyclone in Kansas, earthquake in Mexico, volcano in Germany…."

"Wake up, wake up…" Paul slapped his face trying to wake himself. "Wait, there are no volcanoes in Germany!!!"

"Well, they do now…" Bridget walked before the TV with her cape swaying to steal some pizza from her father. "And I've got to take care of it." She took a bite as she paced a bit in her costume. "I'm going to need a lot of help. Jackson, Maddie, Jackie, Lily, Derek…"

"Who are these people?" Paul asked.

"No one…" Bridget stepped to the door and opened it heading out.

"Bridget, please…" Paul clutched his chest. "I think I'm having another heart attack!" His daughter beamed lovingly to him and bent forward to hug him. She kissed his cheek and hugged him then signed something off her list.

"Cured it!"

"Oh my god!!!" Paul tried to see that list.

"Got to go, Daddy… Love you…" She reached up to the sky and started lifting off the ground. "See you in March…"

"March?!!!" Paul realized this was the first week of December. He looked up into the sky. "Bridget, please, come back! Come back to me! Stay away from airports! Brigid!!!" He screamed reaching to the sky.

"Brigid!" He reached from his hospital bed. His eyes looked around for the moment and noticed his wife by his side. Cate looked deep into his eyes and beamed out of joy to see him awake. She took his head in her hands and kissed him. Her eyes were filled with tears and her heart feeling elated with feelings of joy. Paul felt tubes into his nose and looked to machines connected to him by wires, tubes and cords. The room was filled with flowers and bouquets of every type. The other chair was filled with three potted plants and cards both store-brought and homemade littered the walls.

"Paul…" Cate kissed him over and over. She sniffed briefly and wiped her nose with Kleenex before beaming over her husband again. "I've been here everyday after work to check up on you. I was so worried about you."

"I guessed I scared everyone at the party last night, huh?" He dreamily and tiredly gasped. His chest was cross-crossed was stitches under his robe. "Did I make my surgery?"

"You had your surgery." Cate lovingly confessed sitting by his side. "Two surgeries… and the party was last month, not last night. You've been slipping in and out of a coma ever since." Paul's face confusingly looked up to her. "The doctors said somehow, someway that you were fighting stay alive. They couldn't explain it, but they knew something was keeping you alive."

"A month?" Paul looked to Cate. He looked around the room once more filled with walls of loving cards and flowers. Not a surface was clear, not a clear view to the wall from five feet down from the ceiling. Furniture from home was here, pictures of the kids surrounded him and a large wreath from Harry humorously read "Get Back To Work!" He beamed from one end to end of all of his well-wishers then realized something was missing.

"Where's Bridget?"

"Bridget?" Cate stroked her husband's face. "She's not here, Paul. She's never been here."

"But… I felt her…"

"Paul…." Cate choked back the grief. "Bridget vanished the night you went into the coma."

Paul looked at Cate. The fact had been hard for her. The news had shaken up the family to its core. While grieving for her husband, she had to grieve the loss over their firstborn daughter. His wife kissed his hand and stroked his features. Paul stifled back on his emotions and tried to speak, but all he could do was choke on his breath and the deep sorrow permeating through his soul. He woke up for this? To say goodbye to his daughter?

"She just vanished?"

"The police found a girl's body in the river a week afterward, but they didn't think it was her." Cate's voice trembled before she blew her nose. "She'd been in the water too long to identify. I don't want it to be her, but my dad wants me to accept it. He and CJ have been staying with us, but as long as I got hope, somehow, someway I know my daughter is alive somewhere out there." She began crying again.

"Beej…" Paul's eyes welled up and his new heart valve started breaking. His chest pumped a few times and he began crying. Cate didn't want to have to tell him, but she knew he'd find out sooner or later. They heard someone else enter the room.

"Cate," Dr. Masterson was back on duty. "Visiting time is over." She looked over to Paul. "How you feeling, Paul?" She walked up checking his stats.

"Can't I stay longer, Liz?"

"Sorry, hun…" Liz held her clipboard to her chest. "But John has tests he wants to check with Paul before he can even think about dismissing him and that could take all night, but don't worry, I'm on duty all night."

"Okay…" Cate turned and kissed her husband around his tubes. "Don't be going back to sleep now."

"If I do, I'll try to wake up." Paul's pale and beleagered face tiredly beamed his weary grin to her. Cate lovingly held his hand a few seconds more as she collected her purse and jacket. A kiss blown from her lips, she wrestled with her jacket and hesitantly pulled it on over her arms moving her purse from arm to arm. As she pulled her hair out from under her collar, her eyes fell upon the crack in the wall outside the room. It just never went away. They spackled it, painted it and replaced the wall, but it kept returning. Someone said it extended through the whole building from the foundation to the roof. Passing it out of her mind for now, Cate pressed her fingers to it briefly and thought of her missing daughter for a moment for some reason. Wherever she was, she hoped she was okay. Her feet headed on out through emergency. Marcy waved at her over her coffee and maintenance wrestled with the busted sliding door. It hadn't worked right since that unknown girl smashed through it after supposedly trying to steal drugs. Liz looked back to Cate with a secret and wondered, did she know the truth yet?

Cate swung her purse strap over her shoulder and walked toward her car parked a few car lengths away. She missed her time working here, but it was much more liberating working as a school nurse than as a nurse on call. That was something she had neglected to tell Paul. She was now working at Liberty High around her daughter, and next year, Rory would be there too. Not a day went by that someone didn't ask about Bridget. Cate thought about her a lot these days, praying she was alive and somewhere out there. She sniffed and sighed upon reaching her car and tossed her purse inside to the other seat. As she briefly slid into the car, she noticed a bright figure standing in the light ten feet from her car. She gazed at it from inside the car a moment then stepped back out for a better look. The long blonde hair, the teenage posture, the large red "S" emblazoned to the front of her chest and the long red cape hanging from her shoulders…. Bridget stood standing a mere few feet from her mother… in the open… in her costume…

"Hi, mom…" She looked away briefly. "Sorry, I've been away, but…. I've been busy."

Awestruck and shocked, Cate stared at her speechless. She didn't know what to say. All she could do was look upon her daughter with stunned astonishment. Her heart said run to her, but her eyes told her to hold back. Mother and daughter stared back and forth between each other and realized things would never be the same again. They waited for each other to make the next move.

Twilight Zone voice-over: "Someone once said… that with great powers comes with great responsibility, so with greater power comes even greater responsibilities. Bridget Erin Hennessey learned that lesson. However, yet, another person once sung about the best of both worlds… but did Bridget earn that promise? Did she give up her future for the life of another, or did she keep her promise and get rewarded with her heart's desire. That's an answer this witness will not make here, but it's a choice you the observer will get to decide. The secret to this scenario can only be found in a dark expanse resting somewhere beyond. It's a realm known better as… The Twilight Zone."

End


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